Stumbled into an old computer shop in St. Louis and it hit me different

I was killing time near downtown St. Louis last weekend and walked into this tiny shop called Midwest Tech. It was full of old desktops, CRT monitors, and boxes of floppy disks. The guy running it told me he's been there since 1998 and still fixes up machines for local businesses. It got me thinking about how much has changed in cybersecurity since then. Back in the late 90s, it was all about virus scanners and passwords on sticky notes. Has anyone else seen a place like that and felt weird about how fast things moved?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancy52418d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah that part about passwords on sticky notes really got me. I read somewhere that a lot of those old machines still have default passwords from the 90s that nobody ever changed. It's wild to think how trusting everyone was back then compared to now where we have to worry about everything being hacked.

tarar2718d ago

Oh come on, is it really that serious though? I've worked in a few older buildings and yeah, you'll find a sticky note here and there but it's usually for some random printer account nobody cares about. Sure, there might be some ancient machines running in a basement somewhere but what are they even doing? Probably just logging temperatures or running some dumb fan. I feel like people watch one YouTube video and suddenly every hospital is one sticky note away from a nuclear meltdown. In my experience, the stuff that actually matters has been patched and updated because nobody wants to be the guy who gets sued for leaving a backdoor open.

drew69018d ago

Read somewhere" being the key words here. People love to repeat that stat but I'd bet half those default passwords got changed years ago on the systems that actually matter. The real problem is the stuff nobody even knows still exists running in a closet somewhere. You ever see the inside of a hospital basement? It's a museum of vintage hardware collecting dust and still doing its job. Makes you wonder what else is out there with "admin" as the password just chugging along.