A 32-Year-Old Bug Walks into a Telnet Server

(labs.watchtowr.com)

14 points | by paimapi a day ago ago

2 comments

  • jacknews a minute ago

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

    RS/6000 wants a word.

  • collinfunk 11 minutes 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