Misleading title: SIEMENS Mobility is looking for said Windows 3.11 admin. NOT the German Railway
Deutsche Bahn is the circus and Siemens in this case the clowns.
Clown Siemens, you say?
I know a guy fitted for the job. He’s well versed in MS-DOS, Win 3.1, 3.11 etc. Hell, he’s even fluent in German, but he’s due a hip and knee replacement this month…
That’s all I’m gonna say.
Good luck with the robot joints!
Legacy hardware and operating systems are battle tested, having been extensively probed and patched during their heyday. The same can be said for software written for these platforms – they have been refined to the point that they can execute their intended tasks without incident. If it is ain’t broke, don’t fix it. One could also argue that dated platforms are less likely to be targeted by modern cybercriminals. Learning the ins and outs of a legacy system does not make sense when there are so few targets still using them. A hacker would be far better off to master something newer that millions of systems still use.
Tell me you know nothing about cybersecurity without telling me you know nothing about cybersecurity. Wtf is this drivel?
Simple solution: Don’t connect it to the Internet. Hackers hate this one weird trick.
And said trick ends when an attacker manages to socially-engineer their way in. (But maybe they’ll drop floppies instead of flash drives around the block this time)
You really think that infrastructure IT is dumb unless it can brush off a Stuxnet-like attack by the CIA and Mosad? Most RR traffic signals in the US are run with mechanical logic, physical switches connected to circuits closed by steel wheels on steel tracks. Do you really want a “move fast and break things” tech bro to update all this stuff for us?
All kinds of infrastructure uses ancient software because it’s reliable. Updating it just to protect from hackers causing damage is likely to cause that damage unintentionally while doing little to protect from hackers anyhow.
Every SCADA related cyber attack and incident has entered the chat.
Even if it’s archaic, a lot of these systems aren’t secure which can be done relatively easily and cheaply with things like basic firewalls and stunnel.
It must be updated sometime or risk being archaic and unmanageable. Chances are high they are paying insane amounts for those legacy mechanical switches you mention.
The actual logic is usually very well portable to a more modern ecosystem.
Or these companies could pay to train (no pun intended) technicians to learn the systems they’d like to maintain. No matter how old they are.
Until entropy comes for the actual hardware (assuming they won’t invest in remanufacture or production of replacements). Re-engineering a successfully working system is more costly and might result in worse outcomes, especially in the near term.
Often these system rely on old components which are just not made anymore.
People don’t design every switch, computer and chip themselves. They buy whatever mainstream stuff is available at the time and combine it into a system
If you want to resupply those old parts you literally need to search Ebay to buy some weird outdated 2nd hand MSDOS PC to put in your “awesome reliable railway system”.
Upgrading at every new whim is of course bad, but once your system reaches legacy age it’s often necessary to fully overhaul and modernize it for the next ~15-20 years.
they can execute their intended tasks without incident
Now if only the Deutsche Bahn could do that too
Cybersecurity != Safety Critical
The author’s grammar
rammarisnt that great as well. Those typos can be should have been catched easily by the spellcheck.Edit: Including me :p
The author’s rammar
Finally caught a *grammar cop doing a typo in the wild. Pure joy.
“catched”
It really depends if these systems (that appear to control arrival boards) are on a network or not. If they’re not, then there is minimal risk to leave them the way they are. Somebody would need physical access to the devices to do harm. If they are on a network then that’s a pretty big deal, but some attacks could be mitigated against by tunnelling and/or additional packet filtering to ensure the integrity of messages.
Continuing on a railway theme you should be FAR more worried all the devices that run up and down the side of railway lines - PLCs that talk with each other and operations centres to control things like lights, junctions, crossings etc. If they’re more than 5 years old then chances are then all that traffic is in the clear, and because these things live in boxes by the railway line, it wouldn’t take much to break into a network and potentially kill people by running two trains into each other.
the job was advertised as being remote…
Well yes. You can code software remotely. That doesn’t mean the end system is reachable through the network. Given it’s DB, I bet these systems are still patched by floppy. Until very recently they’ve used floppy’s to distribute train schedules to be displayed in the train.
The job might be remote, doesn’t mean the system is remote. For all you or I know they want somebody to reverse engineer the protocol of this thing, which could be some weird board & driver that hooks into an old PC so they can switch it out for something else.
It’s in the job description, remote access is available via a repurposed laparoscope robot and webcam placed in front of the original terminal keyboard and CRT
What exactly is the issue? Everything mentioned is true.
It even goes further when you consider how newer technology often incorporates more technology, which means a greater attack surface.
Tell me you know nothing about cybersecurity without telling me you know nothing about cybersecurity.
Oh, the ironing. Sad how you have >100 upvotes.
Not sure how to link a reply on lemmy so I’ll just copy from another comment I wrote here:
I’m not talking about this specific instance, just that block of misinformation/generalisation. Saying that legacy systems are well-secured because they’re “battle tested” is sheer ignorance.
Take side-channel attacks for example. A timing attack is something programmers from the 60’s and 70’s would not have taken into account when writing their hashing algorithms. And speaking of hashing, what hashing algorithms were available back then? CRC32 or something similar? What about salting? You get the idea.
Not to mention that legacy operating systems don’t get security updates. Let’s assume that DOS is secure (which it definitely isn’t), but if that statement were correct, would it apply to Windows XP as well?
All I’m saying is that the article is dead wrong. As software developers in this century, we’ve come a long way. We’ve developed security best practices, written libraries and frameworks, and come up with mitigations for a lot of these security vulnerabilities. These solutions are something that closed-source legacy systems (and anything without active maintenance) would never benefit from.
The “ironing” is lost on you in this case.
It’s the only way to keep the trains free from cylon interference.
Battletrain Deutchlandica
Eventually AI’s gonna be so cheap, someone reading this thread could just be like “eh fuck let’s see if the first episode is good” and then just paste that comment into a website somewhere, wait ten seconds, and click the big play button next to “Season 1, Episode 1”
At least it’s not windows 8.
Thats the reason, why they have Problems to find drivers (If you know, what i mean) 😜
Let’s hope the salary is decent.
If it were a private company I’d bet it was astronomical. But I don’t know about the German government though, it’s hard to say.
It’s a private company… and the salary is not gonna be great.
Germany doesn’t pay wagesThe Federal Government is the sole owner of DB AG.
Since its foundation in 1994, Deutsche Bahn (DB AG) has been a public limited company and accordingly has a dual management and control structure. It is wholly owned by the federal government. The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) is responsible for managing the shareholding.
Shareholders gonna sharehold.
C:>WIN
Migrating to FreeDOS might be feasible for them.
Sign me up if you’re paying $300k+
lmao, 60k eur tops. wages in Germany suck ass, earning at least something is possible if you are running independent consulting or climbing corporate ladder, having some unique expertise or going extra mile as an employee is pretty much pointless.
How much of that 60k is left after taxes? Is it enough to live on, or buy a home, or buy a home and support a family, or none of the above?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone, very informative and interesting. That’s the kind of perspective that may not often be shared and helps understand costs of living.
For the Deutchlanders wondering about the USA’s taxes and my question… 60k would be enough to live on in most of the USA but might not be enough to buy a home or raise a family. But it’s highly dependent on your area’s cost of living, and the USA is massive with many different areas and tiers of costs of living.
My example for tax costs: I make more than 60k and I only had to pay about 20% of it to taxes and retirement for 2023, in the USA. In my low cost of living area, 60k would be enough to buy a house and support a family but it would have to be on a very frugal budget. I bought my house when I was making about 45k but my spouse also had an income of almost that much.
Assuming single with no kids, you’d get:
Gross 60.000,00 €
Net 37.209,78 €
Taxes 11.262,97 € (includes 929,97 € church-tax that you can get rid off by leaving your church)
Pension insurance 5.580,00 €
Unemployment insurance 780,00 €
Health insurance 4.847,85 €
Long-term care insurance 1.249,37 €
Those are all the compulsory insurances.
Having a partner in marriage who earns less than you and / or children will increase your net.
For the average German in your average City that’s somewhere between just short of wealthy and wealthy. There are poorly paid IT specialists who earn gross what you would take home net. It’s definitely enough that you can live quite good if your significant other works too and more than enough to raise a family. The median household income in Germany is 42k gross.
Also remember this is only the employee side of what you cost your employer, because they’ll have to double up your insurances, so you would cost them 75k a year.
Those numbers look similar to US taxes, etc (though not the same, and some of US ones aren’t compulsory)
Depends extremely on where you live. In Bremen you will be fine, in Schwerin you will be comparably wealthy, in Munich you might have to start collecting bottles on the street for some extra money.
Based
Do I get to move to Germany for this?
Remote? Do you connect yourself over telnet or what?
SSH to a KVMoIP or IPMI?
BMC is doubtful, other sources indicate that the hardware is from 1996, so it’s not just old software. So I’ll guess a KVMoIP device is bolted on (probably a relay on the power input, VGA, USB for keyboard and ‘floppy’ (Win3.11 was well before USB, but the hardware from 96 may have USB and the BIOS would likely make it viable for a DOS to use it).
10/10 would install Doom on it.
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Just saw a video and certain instruments/displays on trains (original ICE 3 for example) run with Windows 3.11, so thats probably why they are searching for one
