BBS-Era Exploitation for Fun and Anachronism Presented at REcon 2016 https://recon.cx/2016/

Derek Soeder and Paul Mehta Cylance, Inc.

The bulletin board era was a golden age for those of us who were into computers (and in existence) at the time. Yet, think of how much better it could have been if we'd had today's exploitation tradecraft to bring to bear back then.

In this presentation, we're taking modern technology back with us a couple decades and aiming it at BBS-era software, possibly to see what we can learn from attacking these scrutable-yet-unusual systems but mostly just because we can. We'll use tools and techniques that didn't publicly exist at the time to run, reverse engineer, attack, debug, and exploit old code. Finally, we'll demonstrate some of the fun we could've had, if only we knew then what we know now...