Live data from Hacker News

Back Orifice (1998)

web.archive.org

101–110 of 231 posts

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#101
OK I have to say this: reading some of the comments here makes me think I was actually friends with you back in 1998/1999 because that's about when I was doing this same shit in my high school computer lab. Small world.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#102
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

[deleted]

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#103
Netbus and BO got me in so much trouble as a kid (though honestly I probably should have gotten in a lot more trouble).

At school, all the windows machines were locked down with a "security" application called Fortress. I started selling boot floppies that would disable Fortress to teachers, and might have loaded a few of those up with the aforementioned toys.

At home, I don't think I paid for internet access at all until well after college. A port scan of local ISP networks usually yielded someone infected with netbus or bo, and I could snarf their dialup credentials.

While those exploits probably should have landed me in jail, the worst that happened to me was an expulsion as a result of somebody else bulk changing logo.sys across school.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#104

I installed Netbus on the public computers at my local community library. They ran Windows 98 and were connected directly to the internet via a T1 / frame relay connection with a public IP for each machine, no firewall. So I could sit at home and keylog people’s Hotmail passwords. Those were the days ….

I did set up a keylogger in a internet café.

It used to log keystrokes but also the title of the window.

Well... I wasn't looking for anything in particular, I was to about 12-13 and just into computers and didn't even have internet at home.

Well to make it short, there was a lot of porn websites visiting. At all times of the day.

Which in retrospect is immensely weird considering this was a public place.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#105
Seeing this thread and so many familiar stories makes me feel right at home. Sub7 was my RAT of choice. My brother and friends weren't very technical, but I taught them to use Sub7 so they could spread the exe around to their friends and we could all have some fun. We were all heavy ICQ users at the time. It wasn't long before we discovered the ICQ send file box had a size limit on the file name field. So you could, say, call the exe "pic-of-me-nude.jpg .exe" with so many spaces in the file name before the .exe part disappeared that most of our male friends would accept it from a "random female" and run it without any hesitation. Needless to say, we opened a lot of CD ROMS and listened in on many chats.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#106
post #57

We used Back Orifice on a co-worker’s machine in a call center I worked at. While he was working we would open and close his CD-ROM drive randomly. Restart his machine. All the while we’re four seats down just cackling and he’s turning redder and redder as his machine does all these weird things while he’s trying to work.

now-a-days i just put a wireless keyboard mouse adapter and giggle as i move their mouse around and type on their screen.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#107

Netbus and BO got me in so much trouble as a kid (though honestly I probably should have gotten in a lot more trouble). At school, all the windows machines were locked down with a "security" application called Fortress. I started selling boot floppies that would disable Fortress to teachers, and might have loaded a few of those up with the aforementioned toys. At home, I don't think I paid for internet access at all…

There were tons of windows 95/98 computers with network shares exposed to the internet with no or weak passwords. It was really convenient to get their stored password list.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#110
Same as so many others here, I remember messing around with BO with a buddy in high school days. Scanning IP addresses (I think we just started bulk scanning addresses that matched his ISP maybe?), browsing their files, taking screenshots…

And yea, chatting about all this over AIM and IRC… ahhhh.

Post reply on HN