Tbf that's a new-ish principle. 2003 was Windows XP era and the early days of Metasploit. I.e. Microsoft and all the other companies were still figuring out this internet thing, while most computers were riddled with unpatched vulnerabilities. There was no such thing as zero day back then, because you could use many exploits years later.
But Windows Update was definitely already a thing back then, so I don’t think this “Microsoft was still figuring out this Internet thing” holds.
Software was updated all the time, and it’s much more difficult to do that with locks.
> But Windows Update was definitely already a thing back then, so I don’t think this “Microsoft was still figuring out this Internet thing” holds.
They had update mechanisms sure. But it was very much upto you to run. When XP came out most people used dial-up (at least in the UK), after 2002 ADSL internet started to become ubiquitous and computers were on the internet for longer periods.
They had to start baking security into every aspect of the OS. It was one of the reasons Vista came out several years later than planned. They had to pull people from Vista development and move them onto Windows XP SP2.
One of the reasons Vista was such a reviled OS is because the UAC controls broke lots of piece of software which ran under XP, 2000 and 98.
> Software was updated all the time, and it’s much more difficult to do that with locks.
YIt wasn't unusual to run un-patched software that come from a disc for years. You had to manually download patches and run them yourself. A software update / next version could take like 30 minutes or so on 56k dialup to download. If you didn't need to download a patch, you probably didn't.
It was a thing, but it was also a thing to have it disabled or simply not working. XP was famous for its hackability. And web frameworks were also far from what you see today with auto updates. It's hard to describe to people who were not involved how crazy ITsec was back then. It felt like the wild west compared to today. Literally every other DB had a critical unpatched vulnerability. Thankfully Shodan did not exist yet, so the barrier to entry was high for people without a particular skillset (which was also much harder to learn back then). But MSF pushed security awareness pretty hard once people realized how easy it can be if you just collect a bunch of scripts for common exploits in a simple framework that everyone can learn.
Oh, the bugtraq era, when any grade schooler could download a 0day POC and force remote reboot his classmates' laptops. (I'm told)
Grade schoolers didn’t exactly have laptops in the 00s.
Thanks to the largess of a media company (read: school admin golfed with the right people), we had them issued ~97.
A lot of kids learned about cybersecurity and emulator config (and Harvest Moon) because of it, so net win?
Totally true. Also consider that although software can theoretically or technically be patched, sometimes patches just don't exist... the amount of unmaintained but yet useful software is just huge.