👉 Okay, letās talk about something delightfully, and frankly rather unnerving ā "ā0311 Exploits." Now, before you reach for a stiff brandy and start picturing shadowy figures fiddling with dial-uppeds, let me assure you there are no dials involved. Unless you count the ones in your suddenly very worried eyeballs.
Basically, a ā0311 Exploit, as we now jokingly (and somewhat genuinely disturbingly, frankly, within the cybersecurity community) call it, refers to a very specific and rather antiquated weakness in how fax machines handle incoming transmissions, specifically from phone lines. It dates back almost 50 years! Hereās the ridiculously technical, slightly dumbed down breakdown: Originally, early fax machines were really bad at knowing what they were actually receiving on the phone line. They basically brute-forced through whatever was being sent until they hit a stop, resulting in a totally random, garbled mess of information that you then somehow had to painstakingly decipher and hope wasnāt something seriouslyā¦unpleasant. 0311 is a telephone number that when faxed, it triggers the machine to essentially start sending back whatever text, and there are no stops. The older machines were just waiting for an āI'm done here, okay?ā which never came. The genius, and subsequent horror, lay in what people figured out they could actually inject into that random fax stream. They found the old
