MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-11-16 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] windows 3.1
|
A 23-year-old Windows 3.1 system failure crashed Paris airport
Some of the most important networks and systems today are woefully
outdated. And that isn't always a bad thing.
Zack Whittaker
By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day | November 16, 2015 -- 21:04 GMT (13:04
PST) | Topic: Security
(Image: Imgur)
A Paris airport was forced to shut down earlier this month after a
computer running Windows 3.1, a prehistoric operating system from 23
years ago, crashed in bad weather.
Planes were grounded on November 7 for several hours at Paris' Orly
airport, one of the busiest in the region, after un ancien ordinateur
known as DECOR, which links air traffic control systems with France's
main weather bureau, stopped working.
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Put it this way: there are kids in college today who are younger than
this system.
Yet, it's not uncommon for some systems that are critical national
infrastructure to be years or even decades old. Any critical
infrastructure system has to maintain a near-perfect uptime by suffering
very few failures.
Some of the most important networks and systems today are woefully
outdated. And that isn't always a bad thing.
Alexandre Fiacre, an executive at one of France's air traffic controller
unions, told Vice that the system is made up of various machines running
four different operating systems, including a mixture of Windows XP and
Unix, and that are "all 10 and 20 years old."
According to an article in Le Canard Enchaîné, the French transport
minister promised that the airport's equipment "will be upgraded by
2017." Fiacre disagrees, saying it could take two to four years after
that "at the earliest."
The bigger problem may not be the old software, but exactly who will
keep the system ticking until the software is finally deprecated. One of
the system's key maintenance workers is set to retire next year, said
Fiacre.
It's not the only air-traffic control system that's old and outdated. A
number of systems, in Europe at very least, have been accused of being
decrepit and "not fit for purpose."
Last year, flights over the UK ground to a halt after the air traffic
system collapsed as a result of a software bug. The flawed code was
linked to one of the many dozens of connected systems at its main
operations center in the south of England.
At the time, the chief executive of NATS -- the aerospace firm that
operates the UK's air traffic -- said the company will move to modern
internet-based systems over the next five years.
Last year, sister-site CBS News reported that some of the US military
facilities storing the country's nuclear missiles are run on decades-old
floppy disks, and aren't connected to the internet to prevent cyberattacks.
"A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network. Cyber
engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely
secure on the way it's developed," Maj. General Jack Weinstein told CBS
News, adding that the system will as a result stay the way it is for the
foreseeable future.
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"Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it
comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world," he added.
Indeed, there is a point that it takes a human operator to physically
insert a disk that could otherwise theoretically be a touch of a button.
A level of complication mitigates potential mistakes -- and disaster.
And even if the silos were hooked up to the internet, having the nuclear
launch program on a physical medium makes it impossible to hack even if
the network was breached.
There can be an advantage in having systems that old -- almost everybody
has forgotten about them, making them less likely to be attacked. It's
the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" issue, except, when something
breaks inevitably something has to give.
Some systems are so old and obsolete they can be less of a target than
many systems today. The downside is a lack of maintenance, patches, and
updates that can prevent unauthorized access, data breaches, or
denial-of-service attacks, which in the case of an air-traffic system
could be devastating to a country's economy.
To paraphrase Slate: It's an odd balance between tech that's obsolete
enough to not be a target, but current enough to still work.
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