171–180 of 231 posts
This brings me many good memories of my script kiddie humble beginnings. It all started with backoriffice and mIrc and slowly it evolved to me wanting to run bitchX and eventually getting into linux. It probably took me an year to go from being a windows user to exclusively run Slackware and poring over Phrack :)
There 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....
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,…
99.99% of the time people ran it. Almost no exception. I spared no friend. :D
Back in the good old days we were sending this to random ICQ users saying something like "hey I'm a game developer and made this game, would you like to try it?". I'm not very proud of that tbh.
What you could do was embedding the BO exe inside another exe disguised as a jpg picture. When executed it would extract and run BO in the background and also display a jpg. ICQ conveniently didn't display the end of long filenames, so you could send it as "xyz.jpg[20spaces].exe" and it would seem like you just shared a picture. Worked like a charm the one time I tested this technique on an unsuspecting friend during…
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…
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 scri…
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 ha…
Tangentially related but, back in the late 90s in my first year at BSc Software Eng. I got in trouble because I cracked the password of a Win98 program called Protect-Z which put some user controls I my Uni's labs machines. The funny thing is that when the person in charge of all the labs found out I had the password, he asked me how did I get it. When I explained to him about how I attached to the protect-z process…
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…
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 scri…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wanted to write it was a crime still back then and take the example of the first worm in 1988 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm TIL: a Harvard student named Paul Graham was quite close to Robert Morris. It is a small world.
you might be interested in seeing the founders of yc https://www.ycombinator.com/people/