What is Server Message Block (SMB)and Why is it Important to Me as an Ethical Hacker?

The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol has been around a long, long time. And it has gone through updates over the years, mostly because lots of vulnerabilities have been exploited in this protocol.

History

In the 1980s the SMB protocol was initially developed by IBM for their PC LAN networking system. I remember the days of IBM PS/2 PCs (proprietary as heck), and token ring networking (yay MAUs!)

Back in those days, you had a computer running the Disk Operating System (DOS), and, while there were knock-offs, the two big players were IBM PC-DOS, and Microsoft’s MS-DOS. (Those of you who worked with DOS back in the day might also fondly remember a product called Dr DOS — or DR-DOS as well.) DOS consisted of a black screen with white lettering, and you could only run one application at a time.

Bill Gates’ company Microsoft had been hired by IBM to work on the DOS operating system. However, tensions arose due to IBM’s ongoing development work on a windowed OS called OS/2, and Microsoft’s own ventures into what would one day become Microsoft Windows. There was a splitting of the sheets, and Gates went his way and sold scads of copies of MS-DOS, while IBM, well, not so much.