Back Orifice (1998)

We did that too. Someone almost got fired for it.

Some weird random anecdote about Back Orifice 2000 (BO2k) that nobody asked for:

We were goofing around in high school with this. Putting it on computers in school and messing around. We sent it over to a classmate. Her father was teachter and we figured she might open it on their home PC. (we were 14 at the time, by the way).

Anyway, we made a fake hotmail address in the name of another classmate. These two people didn't share any classes and were not in eachother little social circle. We sent a couple of emails back and forth pretending to be the other guy but lost interest along the way and nothing happend.

Now for the strange part; forward 18 years or so. I'm in the city, I run into the person who we were sending the messages to... with the person who we were pretending to be. Married and 3 children together.

I'd like to think we brought them together in some strange way.

Oh man, yeah also adding to the list of people that abused their highschool computer labs with this. We had so much fun, but we eventually drew the ire of the school IT admin. After class one day the teacher took us aside with the admin and asked if we had installed BO on the computers, which we of course denied... they "believed" us, heh, but gave us a stern warning that whoever was doing it should stop. We would have all probably ended up with felony charges these days.

The next year, so 1999, we actually got approval to attempt to change our grades as an exercise. We actually managed to do it by sneakily copying a floppy one of the teachers used to store their grades with a program called Integrade. We took it home, reverse engineered the password protection to disable it, changed our grades on the copy, re-enable the password protection with the original password, and turned that in as our proof. Our teacher was impressed and super sketched out/nervous at the same time. I guess they never considered we'd succeed and get access to the whole class's grades...

Ah, the memories! I brought this into school and a few of my mates wanted copies. Word got out amongst the teachers that there was some program being used for shenannigans by the pupils. I told everyone do delete it but some didn't realise it'd end up in their recycle bin and the network admin found out. Saturday morning detention material, luckily I didn't got caught :)

There were some fun tools around at that time :) Also there was this Windows bug where by default network sharing was open and of course everybody used a modem so there was no NAT/FW in between. So you could just connect to a random IP and see what's on the disk. (I think there was a tool to find IPs with just that port open.)