Every few years, bugs known to affect all known version of Microsoft Windows turn up calling into question many claims from the lobbying giant regarding their software branch. The Inquirer is one of many sites reporting on recently leaked NSA tools which can target all versions of Windows from the past two decades. Althougth the emphasis in the article titles is on NSA, the exploits only make use of widely known holes in Microsoft systems which Microsoft often tells NSA about long before issuing an attempt at a patch. Their collaboration goes back for years, and even long before it was the first to join the NSA in kicking off the Prism program.
Researcher Sean Dillon from cybersecurity firm RiskSense tweaked the source code of three nicked NSA exploits - EternalSynergy, EternalChampion and EternalRomance - to work against Windows versions dating back as far as Windows 2000.
Windows machines taken over through these exploits are part of a large black market industry where compromised machines are bought, sold, traded, and fought over for the purposes of producing spam, launching distributed denial of service attacks, spreading further malware, ad click spoofing, manipulating polls and games, and many more illegal activities.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday February 08 2018, @03:07PM (1 child)
I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'separately'. You could rig a Win9x installation to always boot in MS-DOS mode quite easily. Win9x also allowed you to create a bootable floppy which would boot plain vanilla DOS (7). Then just add your DOS-mode device drivers, etc...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday February 09 2018, @05:17PM
This is what I did to get Ultima VII to run nicely on Win9X Machines. Then I found Exult, which by and large fixed the issue of being able to play Ultima VII on modern machines. Of course there's also DOSBox and FreeDOS now.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"