A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server
labs.watchtowr.comWow, how did this not get discovered and fixed at the time of:
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2007-0882
Might be a 32 year old bug, but it's practically also a 19 years old exploit?
Ed: I'm confusing TFA with
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-24061
Which seems pretty much identical with the 2007 cve.
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).
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
Thanks for maintaining telnet.
In defence of the reporter, your Readme only says "Send bug reports to bug-inetutils@gnu.org.", there is no distinction for vulnerabilities. [1]The bug was reported on a public mailing list, which is sadly common nowadaysThere is a 3 months old pull request to advertise a private reporting email address but it's unmerged, maybe you could use this renewed interest as a nudge to set it up and merge: https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/pulls/26
One other thing the reporter could have done to make your life easier is to write a repro script rather than just explain the steps in prose.
[1]: https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/src/commit/40f19d84...
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.
> 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.
Thank you for maintaining Telnet! I still keep it around mostly for retro computing purposes to interact with very old operating systems or with machines that aren’t capable of encrypting in any reasonable amount of time.
Security culture in general seems to be very entitled and toxic, the absolute disconnect from reality some of them get needs to be studied
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
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.
> But this is probably forgiven as just sensationalism in writing
Why should we forgive sensationalism in writing at all?
> "1994" > "RISC was a distant dream"
Ahem
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.
Oh yes, "RISC is going to change everything". I remember that line.
Clunky from the author, I think.
Was just coming to comment on that too.
"Tell that to the ARM based Acorn Archimedes I was using at 6th Form College in 1991."
Or all the Sun Sparc servers that were incredibly common at that time. Coincidentally, they almost all ran telnet!
Needs a (March 19) (I know HN only does this for years, but this being about vulnerabilities…)
I really dislike articles that blow out of proportion the technical details. TLDR; bounds checking was missing leading to potential memory corruption.
> 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.
If you're going to rip off xkcd pictures, I feel it'd be polite at least credit and/or link the original.
xkcd pics are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license, so attribution is required but using them is ok.
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?
I know people seem to think nsa and other gov threat actors live in a land of zero days and advanced techniques... And to some degree, they sure do develop those and are able to leverage them.
However, from my point of view most targets are able to be compromised by poor configs, hygiene, well known and patchable vulns, or the more likely avenue: the humans operating the system.
> 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.
and SPARC was one of the top choice for server where telnet were run.
and the DEC Alpha RISC CPU was on fire, and ran circles around the desktop CISC CPUs
FYI all signalling is in-band signalling
And all signals are analogue, if you're paying enough attention to the transients ;-)
A surprisingly long article for a one-line fix the authors didn’t send.
Since AI is redacting, a lot of articles are long and boring to read with a lot of useless details.
Redacting what? Did you mean write or edit?
"rédiger" in french, then it's "write" instead of "redacting" I suppose.. sorry for my poor english
RISC was not a distant dream in 1994 LMAO.
That made me spit out my tea. The prose was insulting.
I stopped reading on that line. The entire text is coming off as insulting, entitled and smug.
at that time even Intel had a RISC cpu (i960)
RISC desktop computers were common-ish in UK schools by then.
Of course if you count the 6502 as a RISC chip (if you squint a bit, Page Zero RAM sure does look like 256 8-bit registers to me!) then UK schools had RISC desktops for over a decade before then!
And this is why serious enterprises use telnetd exclusively instead of your childish ssh toy. See why? Because it's got ONE CVE in 3 decades as compared to a never-ending flow of security vulnerabilities in ssh. Security!
/s