Hacker Jeopardy, Wrong Answers Only Edition
Among the evening entertainment at DEF CON is "Hacker Jeopardy", like the TV show Jeopardy, but with hacking tech/culture questions. In today's blog post, we are going to play the "Wrong Answers Only" version, in which I die upon the hill defending the wrong answer.The problem posed is this:
YOU'LL LIKELY SHAKE YOUR HEAD WHEN YOU SEE TELNET AVAILABLE, NORMALLY SEEN ON THIS PORT
Apparently, people gave 21, 22, and 25 as the responses. The correct response, according to RFC assignments of well-known ports, is 23.
A good wrong answer is this one, port 25, where the Morris Worm spread via port 25 (SMTP) via the DEBUG command.
pre-1988 it was 25, but you had to type DEBUG after connecting ?— pukingmonkey? (@pukingmonkey) August 10, 2019
But the real correct response is port 21. The problem posed wasn't about which port was assigned to Telnet (port 23), but what you normally see these days.
Port 21 is assigned to FTP, the file transfer protocol. A little known fact about FTP is that it uses Telnet for it's command-channel on port 21. In other words, FTP isn't a text-based protocol like SMTP, HTTP, POP3, and so on. Instead, Continue reading
