Of Course if this info was seen by the US
No amount of double checking would have saved them from a carpet bombing of his house
An innocent explanation has emerged after a security expert linked a group of Islamic extremists to Iran after supposedly discovering the crew on a list of state-sanctioned leased telephone lines in the Middle East nation. Mike Kemp, a co-founder of UK-based Xiphos Research, found two entries for "Ansar Al-Mujahideen" in a …
And plain text password transmission have what exactly to do with X.25 links? Probably you saw a link password being transmitted in BX.25. That's something at the link layer meant to "pair" requipment perhaps but not meant to seriously control access AFAIK. Even in those days the actual data transmissions were encrypted at most sites.
And a fixed line between the 2 endpoints, I have had a hand in setting up a few SWIFT links with the old hardware encryptors on them and whilst you may have been able to see passwords go in via the entry points in cleartext those encyptors and the fixed lines (as well as the ambiguous message formatting) meant it was extremely challenging to intercept.
Ahhhh X25. Those were the days. When stuff just worked (after lots of messing around with no google there to see if someone else wrote about it in a blog post). Give me a VT100. They used to just work too.
Cheers to all the bits and pieces that have either grown or fallen aside to get us where were are today.
Boos to those who see the word "Iran" or "Islamic" and instantly assume it means "al-Qaeda" or "terrorist"
Too true. We still sell lots of it, and the most recent version of the standard (a few years back now) added extra parameters that made it work on very high-speed, low-latency links ike satellite comms. It may have been the precursor to IP, but it isn't dead yet by a long chalk.