RFC 602

Okay bestie, this RFC is literally a holiday-themed security warning 🎄🫶

Here's the title block tea ☕: it's RFC 602, filed under the Arpa Network Working Group by Bob Metcalfe (PARC-MAXC), dated Dec 1973, with NIC #21021. It doesn't list a category, and it doesn't say it obsoletes or updates anything. 📜✨

"The Stockings Were Hung by the Chimney with Care" 🧦🎀

Okay so the ARPA Computer Network is lowkey vulnerable to security violations for at least three reasons, and I need you to be aware 💀

1. Individual sites are used to physical limits on who can get into their machines, so they haven't yet taken enough precautions to lock their systems against unauthorized remote use 🙈 Like, plenty of people still use passwords that are super easy to guess 😭 Think their first names, their initials, their host name spelled backwards, or a string you can type in one go, like ZXCVBNM. Literally no thoughts head empty 💅
2. The TIP lets people onto the ARPANET way more than anyone planned or wanted 😳 TIP phone numbers are posted like the random numbers scribbled on phone booth walls and in bathrooms 🙃 The TIP didn't ask for any user identification before giving service. So a bunch of folks, including the ones who used to spend their days ripping off Ma Bell, can get into our stockings totally anonymously 🦋💀
3. There's still a lingering affection for the challenge of breaking into someone's system 👀 That affection hangs on even though everyone knows it's easy to break systems, and even easier to crash them 🔥

Honestly this would be super funny and cause for some raucous eye winking and elbow nudging 😂🌈 but in recent weeks, at least two major serving hosts were crashed under suspicious circumstances by people who knew exactly what they were risking ⚠️ And on a third system, the system wheel password was compromised 😱 by two high school students in Los Angeles, no less 🙀

We suspect the number of dangerous security violations is bigger than any of us know and it's growing 📈 So you are advised not to sit "in hope that Saint Nicholas would soon be there" 🎅💖

RMV:rmv
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