I think the audience here would appreciate some stories on the darknetdiaries.com. There are even several interviews with people describing how they got interested in the IT security field in their teens in highschool. Can't really recommend any specific from the top of my head.
Back Orifice (1998)
161–170 of 231 posts
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#162Earlier 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…
Burning a 0-day exploit on changing people's backgrounds or color scheme would be a good bit in 2021
There just was little to no security back then. The entire system was a permanent zero day.
Computers were mostly not networked so the threat surface was small, and like I said most hackers in the sense I described were pranksters. Big money and power was just not in it unless you were going after serious specialized targets, and there were less of those and they were pretty much all air gapped.
Air gap was the only real security back then. Just don’t connect it and guard it physically.
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#163Earlier 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…
Upvoted. Whoever downvoted you has likely never attended certain universities, and clearly has never been in the military. Doing things that are wrong and fun while still being harmless requires creativity.
For it being called hacker news this place is very conventional. It’s better than /r/programming though.
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#164There is also Sub7 from the same period: https://web.archive.org/web/20050401072114/http://www.hackpr...
Sub7 was a lot of fun. So many options. I will add to the computer lab anecdotes. I gave this to my buddies at school who were in the same crew(we mostly made VB 'proggies' for AOL,) but of course two of them install it in the library computer lab. I told them it's not illegal to have but is to use. They mess with students even doing things like deleting essays being written. The IT people figure it out and my buddies get arrested and cut ties. They are expelled for a whole year and when they come back can't use any school computers. Did anyone ever figure out if there was a backdoor in the backdoor from the maker?
But that kind of stuff is what got me interested in computers and programming back in junior high. Learned the basics of control statements and OOP in a fun engaging way. I made an AOL chatroom mailserver with sendkeys :D and later became more advanced using APIs. These were very much like mIRC but AOL hosted all the files so even better. There were private chatrooms based on just making these things and prewritten libraries floating around. Who remembers genocide.bas?(hey I didn't name it) Anybody have these? I have copies somewhere on a zip drive.
Remember punters? In dialup days you could flood a person with chat messages containing html heading tags that would slow them down rendering to the point they could never catch up. Others eventually found exploits that could crash the app on one message.
The Trojans for AOL were also pretty good. Would capture the password field and once connected open an email in the background and send it wherever, then delete sent. Back then though you could as easily just say you are an admin and ask someone for their password. Your whole neighborhood probably openly sharing through netbeui.
I think it's long enough ago to say I ran an FTP on mirc and the password was like the 5th word on the xdrive free account confirmation page. They started at $2 a referral and I bought a nice 17" ViewSonic monitor to play Quake on in the 8th grade. Other friends bought whole computers. Shut that down when the FTP got hacked and I got a cease and desist letter for 3d studio max, thought the law was coming to break down my door. After that I mellowed out.
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#165It's amazing how vulnerable Windows used to be. And despite that it took over the computing world. Ah to live in the pre-internet days.
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#166Some 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…
Back at MIT I had a script that would use "finger" to check who was logged into various machines on Athena clusters (MIT public computers) and occasionally send Zephyr messages to two adjacent people, one saying "look to your right" and another saying "look to your left" causing the two people to look at each other.
I like to think a lot of inadvertent introductions and friendships might have been created by the script.
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#167There is also Sub7 from the same period: https://web.archive.org/web/20050401072114/http://www.hackpr...
Also, NetBus ...
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had many 'randoms' added on MSN messenger. Usually acquired through everyone inviting his complete contact list to one conversation. We used to discuss all and sundry back then. I was always slightly more nervous messaging the girls (obvious from their elaborate emoticon-saturated screen names). Curiously, one of my friends had a contact named 'korea@hotmail.com' who was always online but never replied. I sometimes…
> Usually acquired through everyone inviting his complete contact list to one conversation. Man, those were the days... Most of my contacts disappeared one by one (except for 2 which are my oldest friends now!), and it seems like that kind of atmosphere (just adding random people to chat) doesn't exist anywhere anymore, does it?
Smaller Discord servers are close
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#169There is also Sub7 from the same period: https://web.archive.org/web/20050401072114/http://www.hackpr...
I remember this - and using the same CD opening closing joke on people in the college lab. The technicians had no idea what was going on. I don’t think they really knew anything about computers - we once found a word doc on one of the computers with every password for the entire college / website etc.
Did this to my Computer Programming teacher in high-school while he sat in the other room and we could watch him visibly confused. Probably the most vivid memory I h ave from high-school.
Re: Back Orifice (1998)
#170There is also Sub7 from the same period: https://web.archive.org/web/20050401072114/http://www.hackpr...
The most fun I had with Sub7 (or maybe it was Netbus?) was opening the CD-ROM drives of computers in the computer lab and watching people's reactions. Good times....