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Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

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41–50 of 106 posts

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#41

Recently a friend of mine sent me a piece of obfuscated JS that was in a phishing page that was being posted around his large gaming related website. Threw the JS into closure compiler with advanced optimisations and pretty print and out comes relatively unobfuscated code- it cleared up the series of horrible regexes anyway. The code injected a Java applet that downloaded a botnet virus. Decompiling the Java applet r…

Any idea why would he put his Steam ID in the applet?

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#42

Well, back in my pre-teen script kiddie days of using BO2K/Netbus and early Sub7 builds I was on the other side of the screen. Sub7 I recall distinctly had all the listed features and a lot more - keylogging, chat client, webcam viewing, screen capture, open/closing CD tray, etc. There was a GUI interface that would let you select any of the above features that would create a payload that could be injected into any .…

I used to do the same stuff, we didn't even see it as malicious back then, just a "prank" really. Most the people we "infected" were via IRC and ICQ, embedding the exe client into a JPG (or just changing the exe icon to a JPG one) and DCC'ing it to them. Once infected, we'd screw around, make errors pop up on their screen like "Computer Is Low On Coffee, Please Insert Coffee Cup" then make CD tray eject, etc. Then we…

How did you embed the exe client into a jpg (rather than just changing the icon)?

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#43
post #15

When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security. One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~1…

Perhaps a rather naive questions, but: were the username and pw transfered in plaintext?

Think of the username and password as a tracking cookie, more than actual authentication.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#44

Recently a friend of mine sent me a piece of obfuscated JS that was in a phishing page that was being posted around his large gaming related website. Threw the JS into closure compiler with advanced optimisations and pretty print and out comes relatively unobfuscated code- it cleared up the series of horrible regexes anyway. The code injected a Java applet that downloaded a botnet virus. Decompiling the Java applet r…

Any idea why would he put his Steam ID in the applet?

It was on a website for trading items on steam. Perhaps he wanted to force them to trade items, then sell the items on for real life money.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#46
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Steve Gibson story was really interesting. He's a really cool guy, too. My botnet adventures happened around the same time as his, and I too was DDoS'd. We even exchanged a few e-mails about botnets and the script kiddie culture. Those were fun times.

Except when he went on record opposing the addition of raw-sockets to Windows XP saying it would help hackers and spell the end of the world. I remember clutching my Redhat CD, just in case raw sockets were banned ;-) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/25/steve_gibson_really_...

And then you know they banned them with a nonremovable patch, right? http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2005/4

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#47

To answer the title: yes. It was my freshman year of college and my first introduction to broadband in 1998. I discovered irc via mIrc and somehow somebody put something on my computer where they could control the mouse/keyboard. I watched the guy move the cursor around for a while then begin to type to him. He was cool, and told me how to prevent it from happening again.

How did he do it?

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#48
post #15

When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security. One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~1…

Interesting but when I ran into a similar backdoor on a clients server, it had been infected through a phpbb upload script, I found the password to the IRC server in clear text by using either hexdump or string. Not sure which of the tools but I also tried connecting and found a channel with just around 20-30 bots at the most. Fun experience just like yours.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#49
Back in the days I used to do this. I would stay up better part of the night adding random people to MSN or ICQ and sending the Trojan saying it was my picture. So before sending it I would describe myself as someone they'd want to see, to drive up their curiosity, basically I'll be what they'd want me to be. This was very successful. I never maintained a big list of zombied boxes, I'd infect remove on a per night basis depending on how bored I was.

I also saw the progression of hiding IP's in MSN connections. At first they would make a direct connection, later they only made a direct connection while transferring files bigger than a certain size. They completely removed it after some point, don't remember very well.

After I got to know more about networking how things are connected, I realized that my ISP allowed to initiate NULL sessions to other customers. I remember how excited I was to find this. I would place the RATs everywhere with curious names in hopes for them to click or just test exploits on them.

Another interesting thing I found was I was able to invite anyone, even random emails (Hotmail) while having a group chat. I had so much fun doing that back then.

After infection it was basically just chatting, messing with the LED's, CD-ROM's.. people were more interested in finding out how I did it and just chat rather than being mad. I remember one time when I did this to a friend he got scared and ripped of the cable breaking the wall socket.

It was really easy to evade anti-virus programs at the time. I usually just split the file into half, run the scanner on it, split again until I narrowed down to the signature and would just change a value or two.

It was interesting to see how many times people change the text before hitting send while chatting. Obviously I was too naive to know and respect privacy back then.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#50
Sorry for the tangent, but did the author really have to assert his or her endorsement of Chinese nationalist politics and write "Taiwan, China" instead of the neutral "Taiwan"? Taiwan is not currently controlled by the PRC, regardless of whether or not one believes it "should" be. Taiwan's acting government, the ROC, believes it shouldn't be, and China's government, the PRC, believes it should be. Most Taiwanese people seem to agree with the ROC, but I've met some who identify as Chinese and would be fine being governed by the PRC. To refer to a disputed land as objectively part of a specific country, one that doesn't even currently govern it no less, really bothers me.
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