Attack Of The Dreamcasts

kevin_conaway writes "A pair of coders are now suggesting that it is possible, with a modified dreamcast system running Linux to sneek into an office building and stick it on a network drop and leave. The dreamcast will then probe for ways to connect to the outside world. They say they have created similar software for iPAQs and a special bootable cdroms for print servers and similar boxes. Just a reminder that are networks need to be as secure on the inside as they should be on the outside. Get the story here."

Comments

How is that going to work?

[Kith_Me]

Someone strolls into the office, notices a dreambox in the corner... and they say "Hmmm, that is normal, I'll just ignore that"... hehe

More likely that they would say "Cool, lets see what game is in it!"

Re:How is that going to work?

[jayhawk88]

"Hey Bob?"
"Yeah Mike?"
"There's something wrong with your Dreamcast, I can't get it to boot up Soul Calibur."
"My Dreamcast? What Dreamcast?"
"Your Dreamcast...you know, the one you had plugged into the 2nd floor comms closet?"
"That's not my Dreamcast. Did you ask Dave?"
"Yeah, both he and Shirley say they've never seen it before."
"And you say it won't play Soul Calibur? Did you try booting it with no disc?"
"Yeah, it comes up with some weird black screen and says it's beginning port scan, or some such nonsense like that."
"Huh, I wonder what made it do that?"
"Who knows. Oh well, guess I'll go plug it back into the router that it was plugged into."

That was from Pirate School!!!

[cnelzie]

Been to Pirate Training School?

Replacing 'our' with 'are' is a very common pirate thing to do. Of course, even that was slightly misspelled since 'arr' is the most correct usage, matey...

-.-

This happened to me...

[FortKnox]

... so I just popped in NFL2K2 and showed the hacker who was boss!!

So the commercials were right...

[Cutriss]

All those girl ninjas running around stealthily tucking Dreamcasts under their arms - They weren't trying to steal them. They were trying to deploy them!

Now I understand the tagline... It's thinking...

I'm sure a few people mentioned it, but...

[glwtta]

yeah, if you have random people entering your building unsupervised and plugging things into the network, you just might have a security problem, Dreamcast or no Dreamcast.

I would think much in the same way, a Dreamcast running linux can be used to seriously injure a person, but sneaking up on them and hitting them over the head with it, repeatedly. Of course that's not newsworthy, unless it's a Dreamcast running linux.

Mod the box first

[Henry V .009]

If you mod the box into something black with LEDs, it might not look so out of place. Especially if you tape a while piece of paper with "67...2 Router:Smurphy" to the top (well not look out of place to the peons, anyway). Everyone will be afraid to touch it.

Extra Humiliation Factor

[duck_prime]

[How is this any different] from sneaking in and connecting a laptop to the network? I mean, wouldn't a Dreamcast plugged into the company network be a bit more suspicious than a computer?

Well, there's the extra humiliation factor... Imagine a bunch of IT boys from different corps going out for a beer:

BOFH1: Yeah, I got 0wn3d today by a massive distributed DOS attack from thousands of zombie machines across the 'net.

BOFH2: Ha! That's nothing. I got r00t3D when someone compromised the latest openSSH source. That woz pretty elite.

BOFH3: (mumble mumble)

BOFH2: What was that?

BOFH3: [sobbing] An iPAQ! I got H4x0r3D by a fucking iPAQ, okay? Are you happy now?

BOFH1: What a l00zer.

BOFH2: Good grief.