Re: Going back to dumb terminals ...
There were millions of end user devices like 3270's and VT100's,
The 3270 isn't a dumb terminal. It's one of the quintessential smart terminals, in fact. Your argument might be stronger if you knew what you were talking about.
Some 3270 models have enough firmware and do enough local processing that it's not at all improbable that they have exploitable bugs. And even in the feature set there are plenty of possible exploits under certain threat models. Partitions, local map sets, local character sets...
And if the comms link isn't secure, all bets are off.
The VT100 is a mostly-dumb terminal, but even it has enough features that it'd be unwise to include it's inherently "secure" under some non-trivial threat model. It has NVRAM. It has an answerback message, which might be changed to confuse a poorly-written host application. And again you have to trust the link.
but there was no malware problem.
That's rich, that is.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
