This assault also demonstrates that machines operated by home users or small businesses (hosts less likely to be maintained by a professional sysadmin) are integral to the robustness of the global Internet. As is the case with biologically active
Do you always let your stereotyping lead you by the nose like this ...? Home users ... maybe. Small businesses ... not.
I think your faith in mankind is sorely misplaced on this issue. Small businesses are no more likely to be well maintained than many home systems. There is little to no motivation for the majority of small businesses to have an on staff IT professional. Most simply have a person who is slightly more knowledgable than the other people there. This isn't because they are ignorant but because the cost/benefit analysis doesn't indicate that one is really worthwhile. One might say that any place which has a webserver or telnet server or whatever should be large enough to afford an IT person. Except that ignores the fact that several OSes install things like this automagically or at least with great ease. I suppose much of this also depends on what you consider to be a small business though. I am only speaking from experience both as a consultant to small businesses and having worked for several in my life.
Systems Affected
Systems running versions of telnetd derived from BSD source.
How many of us here run anything less than SSH and even allow telnetd to live on any of our hosts?
Here? Probably not all that many. In the real world? Probably the majority (at least up until recently).