Yes, the vulnerability is so old, it dates from a time when networks charged on a ‘per-packet basis’.
A long, long time ago, in a land free of binary exploit mitigations, when Unix still roamed the Earth, there lived a pre-authentication Telnetd vulnerability. In fact, this vulnerability was born so long ago (way back in 1994) that it may even be older than you. To put the timespan
@whitequark well telnet is obsolete since ssh was introduced in 1995 so 🤔
Also coming up with some hypotethical age old system that only runs telnet...
Well if you have to run such a thing in 2026 you better have it fully isolated to begin with otherwise you just ask for the maximum pain and suffering.
@whitequark I highly doubt it as it is illegal to run such insecure setups for essential systems here in Germany.
I remember many a U-Boot* hunt in the late 90s to early 2000s to find those systems.
Haven't seen one in the wild in the last 15 years with the exception of a badly configured Cisco router in a hospital administration about a decade ago.
*Undocumented legacy systems
✧✦Catherine✦✧
VoidZeroOne 
