A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server

Posted by paimapi 1 day ago

A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server(labs.watchtowr.com)

55 points | 23 comments

collinfunk 4 hours ago|

As the person who wrote the fix for this issue (and not the original code), I will just mention that I find this paragraph makes the author sound incredibly entitled:

    Shamefully, the inetutils project hasn’t actually released a fixed version of their software (at least at the time of publishing).

The bug was reported on a public mailing list, which is sadly common nowadays [1]. After my workday, during which I was not able to review the report, I wrote a script to confirm the bug was real, since I was seeing way too many slop reports at the time. Then I sent a patch before going to bed [2]. A third party then graciously shared the patch on oss-security [3], which all distributions follow. There is no need to make a new release, which is harder for the distributions than simply applying a small patch.

Perhaps I am just unlucky in my interactions, but I feel like this entitlement is too common among software security people. Note that I see zero return in spending time working on Inetutils, and I find other projects I work on more interesting.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg... [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-03/msg... [3] https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/12/4

x______________ 3 hours ago||

The not-so-silent minority hanging out on HN know that the true heroes are those who take the time and put in the effort, and then put even more effort to reply and post about it here.

Thanks to all of our heroes, op included.

TacticalCoder 16 minutes ago|||

> The not-so-silent minority hanging out on HN know that the true heroes are those who take the time and put in the effort, and then put even more effort to reply and post about it here.

We know that the entirety of the AI movement is built on top of open-source projects like Linux and all the terminal and command line utilities. And runs inside projects doing god's work (say to contain the agents) like QEMU etc.

AI lives inside the work of our open-source heroes and would be absolutely nowhere without the work of all those people.

> Thanks to all of our heroes, op included.

Definitely, thanks GP and thanks to all our heroes.

taftster 4 hours ago|||

It's an unfortunate statement. And it does feel like it discredits you and the heroic efforts of those like you.

But this is probably forgiven as just sensationalism in writing, which is all too common. Not to excuse the author, but these types of writeups tend to drift into name calling and finger pointing a little too soon.

"Shamefully" is definitely the wrong word here, for sure.

JoshTriplett 2 hours ago||

> But this is probably forgiven as just sensationalism in writing

Why should we forgive sensationalism in writing at all?

saidnooneever 2 hours ago||

you are right they are entitled brats. usually they cant write good code themselves and they purposefully look for very old or low traffic code to find things that are 'old' etc. to make stupid uninteresting AI generated blog posts.

i have not seen a decent writeup in one of these clickbait things these ppl push out.

just ignore these types of ppl. its fine to fix the bugs ofc but what i mean is, ignore their attitudes. its a kids' attitude to life they keep

johnnyApplePRNG 1 hour ago||

Something tells me the NSA is none too pleased about the advent of LLMs.

Or is there a tradeoff?

Fewer ancient holes like this for their hackers but wide open access to anyone who installs codex or claude code?

notimetorelax 4 hours ago||

I really dislike articles that blow out of proportion the technical details. TLDR; bounds checking was missing leading to potential memory corruption.

ErroneousBosh 29 minutes ago|

> TLDR; bounds checking was missing leading to potential memory corruption.

... if you hold it just right, and let the light of the full moon shine through it on a particular day, while you send a carefully-crafted packet through the right brand of NIC over cables forged by long-forgotten smiths.

b800h 2 hours ago||

> "1994" > "RISC was a distant dream"

Ahem

dspillett 1 hour ago|

Maybe I'm in a generous mood, but I would credit the writer with making a joke about the content of the film they had just mentioned and subsequently show a screen cap of work the subtitles for a line about RISC being a significant future technology, rather than being that historically inaccurate in their own tech memory.

krautsauer 3 hours ago||

Needs a (March 19) (I know HN only does this for years, but this being about vulnerabilities…)

ErroneousBosh 30 minutes ago||

> In fact, this vulnerability was born so long ago (way back in 1994)

> That was so long ago that RISC was still a distant dream.

Yeah ARM would like to have a word with you. I'd been using RISC on the desktop for about five years by then and I was not an early adopter.

mitxela 3 hours ago||

FYI all signalling is in-band signalling

ErroneousBosh 27 minutes ago|

And all signals are analogue, if you're paying enough attention to the transients ;-)

khrbtxyz 3 hours ago||

A surprisingly long article for a one-line fix the authors didn’t send.

Skywalker13 3 hours ago|

Since AI is redacting, a lot of articles are long and boring to read with a lot of useless details.

sjpb 3 hours ago||

If you're going to rip off xkcd pictures, I feel it'd be polite at least credit and/or link the original.

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