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Back Orifice (1998)

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Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#91

Post by api »

neals wrote: post #73

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 d…

I’m a bit older and when I was about 14 or 15 I got into assembly language DOS virus writing. This was in 1992 and 1993. It’s actually how I learned x86 ASM. I was involved with an old school hacking (sense 2) group called Phalcon/Skism. Did other fun stuff like “wardialing” with a program called ToneLoc.

Anyway I wrote some viruses and dropped them in my high school computer lab. Several ended up getting loose on the local Cincinnati area BBS scene. One ended up in McAfee antivirus pretty quickly so I assume it spread further. There was basically zero security to stop such things back then.

None of my viruses were designed to do real damage. They would print stupid messages or change your color scheme to funky colors, stuff like that.

This was back when hacking (sense 2) and the computer underground was about a mix of pranks and exploration. It’s not like today where it’s all about serious crime and espionage and the penalties are also serious. It’s definitely not fun anymore.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#92

Post by bequanna »

A few friends and I managed to install this on target machines by starting a chain email and claiming the attached .exe was a “virus patch”.

We would then port scan known IP ranges for our ISP to find a machine we could connect to and play with. It was always fun trying to determine who actually owned the machine we found. I grew up in a small, rural community so it was actually possible to figure this out.

This lasted maybe a year or two around 98,99. A very nice memory on a lazy Saturday morning, thanks for sharing!

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#93

Post by jahnu »

atum47 wrote: post #59
jahnu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think it's fun to stalk women?

By the way, why do you think social media is such a big deal? Cause it's fun to stalk people. Stop trying to make things look sexist

I'm sorry but you literally described breaking into someone's computer in order to snoop on them. You expressed disappointment that there were no photographs and you closed with "fun times". I don't have to do anything to 'make' this looks like abhorrent behaviour.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#94

Post by bdcravens »

Bots to scan all users for BO on IRC were common. I even was a bit mischievous with it myself. Karma was served when I self-owned - was playing with running the server to experiment but forgot I left mIRC running, and in a minute my computer was hosed.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#95

Post by tylerscott »

api wrote: post #91
neals wrote: post #73

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 d…

I’m a bit older and when I was about 14 or 15 I got into assembly language DOS virus writing. This was in 1992 and 1993. It’s actually how I learned x86 ASM. I was involved with an old school hacking (sense 2) group called Phalcon/Skism. Did other fun stuff like “wardialing” with a program called ToneLoc. Anyway I wrote some viruses and dropped them in my high school computer lab. Several ended up getting loose on th…

This reminds me of when I first discovered the Win32 API and used it to write some silly annoying apps in Borland C++ Builder. This was around 1998 and the worst I ever came up with was a persistent pop up that was difficult to remove due to some registry obfuscation. It had a single button that would open the CDROM tray. I put it on every computer in the lab. Good times. You’re right—it used to be playful to hack around. I miss those days.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#96

Post by surbas »

unixhero wrote: post #31
cpach wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And NetBus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBus

All hail Netbus. It was so much fun. Those were good times. Pranking and harmless fun.

Wikipedia would seem to disagree:

> “ However, use of NetBus has had serious consequences. In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBus

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#97

Post by batch12 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #42
peejfancher wrote: post #9

I used to use this tool to mess with my college computer class professor. Me and a buddy installed it on the teachers computer that she used to instruct the class. We did mostly innocent stuff like closing windows or messing with the browser a bit. Occasionally we would reboot her computer when it was close to the end of class and we didn’t want to start something new. We’re both still coders to this day.

I'm wondering if people like you have grown up to be the people who break user interfaces needlessly, write cookie popups, integrate ads and telemetry, and force updates on things that don't need them. In other words, did you grow out of your childish shenanigans or are you just getting paid for them now?

Nah, some of us now use the knowledge gained to defend against real threats.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#98

Post by junon »

habibur wrote: post #54

I was thinking of it recently. Does it still run on modern Windows? Has anything new arrived as its alternate?

I highly doubt it works these days. For a while there was Cain and Abel (probably spelled differently) and a few other popular RATs running around.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#100

Post by themark »

ridaj wrote: post #89
themark wrote: post #49

I installed this on a pc at work when it came out to see what it could do. I must have forgot to shut it off because there was a gang of security people in my office the next morning.

It's interesting that your place of work was loose enough about security to let you install stuff off of the internet as it came out, yet paranoid and skillful enough to actually notice and get you in trouble the next day!

I know what you mean. I recall that installing software from the internet was rather novel in the late 90s.
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