> I learned my lesson to not talk about such things because their egoes were too fragile.
Yip, ego's and people talk are the downfall of many an innocent `self-education` in the area of IT security.
Post 80's and laws started to change, prior, in the UK it was theft of electricity being the only way to nail some people. Crazy fun times.
Though I do miss the old phone system per-say, outdials, wardialing, things like that, was common with many and just seemed more mysterious as you could only learn thru word of mouth or self-education as no books or internets and BBS's were not as cheap in the UK or common as we never had the official free local calls aspect as you fine folks had in the US.
Do recall a chap getting kicked out of college for doing something I'd done previously, just that he had a bigger ego and not as delicate with the power to steal the admin password. Which involved an ICL George 3 OS mainframe in the times of very large disc platters and admin console journaling that had no encryption. so they rotated discs without adding extra wear of zeroing the previous content, only the file table so you could end up with a user disc platter that had formally been used as a admin console jounal reposatory and could create files without zeroing and dump the previous contents of the disc of that way...which eventually got you the admin password.
Do recall few instances of work related cases in which I needed to do things so, kinda hacked what I needed (resourcefulness) like upon a DPS7 Honeywell mini computer in which needed the admin password to do something and nobody had it at hand at that time of night and the passowrds were kept in a file that was encrypted so I worked out the encryption key by looking at the file as was poor encryption and text files have lots of spaces so saw a pattern with the word OPERA in and tried and tada, got what I needed. The spooked admin next day wondered how I did it so I told him fully, he then went and redid the encryption and challenged me to see if that was secure, I looked at the encrypted file and kinda worked out by the patterning that it had been encrypted twice....yes with the same password OPERA only encrypted with that and then encrypted again with the same. Educational for all back then. Today, not as easy to do that, but still a great story of times of old.
My ego prevents anything else and was an ethical hacker and the 90's was an era in which, we white hats would and was the internet security, bringing down pedo's and bad actors like that that frequented some platforms with ease (looking at you AOL). So whilst illegal per-say, was case of no real official policing of such things as we do today.
But darn, some things learned and worked out, well zero day exploits back then were not as financially economical as they are today and heck, and some never really appreciated how long they would stay obscured from the wild.
I also liked hardware back then, was also fun and many a hidden switch to get a feature you would normally pay silly money for some engineer to `install` though was just some hidden switch was not that uncommon. Heck even today you get kit that is same inside with a model up just adding some small thing and example would be some Fluke multimeters that you effectively pay hundred for a small capacitor and another digit on the outer shell, is a good example current today.
Fun times indeed, but darn, goalposts always moving.