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Back Orifice (1998)

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Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#181

Post by s_d »

Hi party people, this is Sir Dystic, author of the original 1998 Back Orifice. Great to hear all of you reminiscing about my software!

One thing that I did not predict when I released BO: The distribution ZIP contained three files, a readme.txt, the BO server and the BO client. In retrospect, the BO server should probably not have been distributed with the original .EXE extension as a LARGE portion of people apparently downloaded the ZIP, unzipped it and just double clicked on the BO server, immediately infecting themselves.

Keep disturbing shit please.

..--oo] ooM [oo--..

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#183

Post by s_d »

s_d wrote: post #181

Hi party people, this is Sir Dystic, author of the original 1998 Back Orifice. Great to hear all of you reminiscing about my software! One thing that I did not predict when I released BO: The distribution ZIP contained three files, a readme.txt, the BO server and the BO client. In retrospect, the BO server should probably not have been distributed with the original .EXE extension as a LARGE portion of people apparent…

An interesting bit about the internals and development of the BO code: The BO server was written in C and consisted mostly of a single while(1){ switch(command): ... } loop, the only functions were where callbacks were required, and it reused the same 5 variables in main() for everything. I got feedback from more than one security professional that this made it very difficult to reverse engineer. I think when I was writing it my concern was minimal overhead, and not using the stack must save SOME important resources?

When Dildog wrote BO2k I gave him the BO source to start with, he claims he rewrote everything from scratch and seemed a bit horrified by my code, which was never intended for distribution.

..ooM? ..ooM!

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#184

Post by grioghar »

My time to shine.

BO and NetBus nearly got me arrested on the Friday before my Prom.

I want to tell the rest of this story, but I worry about the statue of limitations and whether the crimes committed are still prosecutable.

I didn’t, at the time, realize what we were doing outside “near, we’re in the ISP’s computers?” but, uh, I found out when the Detectives knocked on my door and took a 16-year-old me downtown to discuss “what I’ve been up to on your computer.”

That story ends with my friend getting kicked out of High School, The HIPAA law guidelines being drafted around some of his actions, then his passing away of an unknown heart issue at 20.

His naive partner-in-crime going on to having a great career in IT.

Side note: we had almost every teacher’s Netware login before we graduated. =)

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#185

Post by grioghar »

mulmboy wrote: post #168
andai wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

+1

Some of my favorite random people I’ve met, I met playing in various games then gave them my Discord channel.

Good, good times.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#186

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

Woah, totally! I feel the need to write this one down. I was in high school when BO arrived. We had such a blast scanning the local dial-up ISP since we know the subnet block they always used, it was fast because it was all within their hardware. Anyway, we noticed a webcam on a computer we discovered, which was very rare at the time, but it was turned off. So we sent a pop-up window that said something like. "system configuration required, please power on all peripherals". And it worked! We were able to capture a short clip and download it. Well, it was uncompressed AVI and a 6 second clip was like 1.6 MB, so it took tens of minutes to get it. When we played it, it was just some dumpy guy with his dumpy wife sitting in the background mumbling stuff; but to us, it was totally 31337...

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#187

Post by s_d »

s_d wrote: post #183
s_d wrote: post #181

Hi party people, this is Sir Dystic, author of the original 1998 Back Orifice. Great to hear all of you reminiscing about my software! One thing that I did not predict when I released BO: The distribution ZIP contained three files, a readme.txt, the BO server and the BO client. In retrospect, the BO server should probably not have been distributed with the original .EXE extension as a LARGE portion of people apparent…

An interesting bit about the internals and development of the BO code: The BO server was written in C and consisted mostly of a single while(1){ switch(command): ... } loop, the only functions were where callbacks were required, and it reused the same 5 variables in main() for everything. I got feedback from more than one security professional that this made it very difficult to reverse engineer. I think when I was w…

The only bug I recall being reported on BO was in the built in HTTP server (which I wrote from scratch in C), if you shared a specific directory with the HTTP server, on Internet Explorer it would not let you click through to sub-directories because of a missing slash at the end I think. I only ever tested it with Firefox which seemed to not care if the slash was present. I found out about this from people who thought it was a feature, and were horrified to find out that anyone COULD access those sub-directories if they manually added the trailing slash or used a different browser.

.ooM.ooF.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#188

Post by grioghar »

s_d wrote: post #183
s_d wrote: post #181

Hi party people, this is Sir Dystic, author of the original 1998 Back Orifice. Great to hear all of you reminiscing about my software! One thing that I did not predict when I released BO: The distribution ZIP contained three files, a readme.txt, the BO server and the BO client. In retrospect, the BO server should probably not have been distributed with the original .EXE extension as a LARGE portion of people apparent…

An interesting bit about the internals and development of the BO code: The BO server was written in C and consisted mostly of a single while(1){ switch(command): ... } loop, the only functions were where callbacks were required, and it reused the same 5 variables in main() for everything. I got feedback from more than one security professional that this made it very difficult to reverse engineer. I think when I was w…

You single-handedly made me interested in computers deeper than playing Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. You made a 12th grader who didn’t have a decent computer at home start learning DNS and saving his dollars for a Pentium to start programming on.

I got into so much trouble my Senior year of High School with your software, but it put me on a path.

Your software and NetBus was all I needed. We owned EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING in our town until we got found out. Naive me at the time thought it was really cool, until the Detectives showed up…

Here’s to you. Thank you.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#189

Post by grioghar »

jadams5 wrote: post #75

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…

Hex-editing Intergrade at certain points allowed you to bypass authentication and go RIIIIIGHT in.

I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but my buddy sure did.

He was kicked out of school a few weeks later for editing his grades.

Re: Back Orifice (1998)

#190

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

bequanna wrote: post #92

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 last…

Yea, same 98,99 window for me doing the same shit. This thread is crazy.
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