Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by tmh88j » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

A long time ago (windows 98 I believe) my screen went blank and green text appeared saying "Hello, how are you?" I was about 12 at the time so I had no idea what was going on. I don't recall my response, but I remember the "person" on the other side saying "You left a back door open. Would you like me to close it?" I restarted my computer and I still have no idea what it was.

Was this a virus, a hacker, something else? I completely forgot about it until this thread.

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

#52

Post by dak1 » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 5:13 PM UTC

Just as a side note, the post was made in Taiwan's D3 forum, but from the use of simplified Chinese, it seems the hacker was from China.

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

#53

Post by napillo » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 5:14 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #36

strebler wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was reading that article thinking "I remember all of those features (and more) being in Sub7 about 12-13 years ago". Not so advanced, really.

Did BO2K/Sub7 allowed to be notified when being debugged ? Maybe it's an easy 'plugin' to write when you have a flexible payload generator I guess.

Perhaps he traced the IP address back to the antivirus company.

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

#54

Post by dak1 » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 5:14 PM UTC

dsrguru wrote: post #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 peo…

I noticed that too. There's no reason to not write simply "Taiwan," since that won't offend anyone's sensibilities.

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

#55

Post by molmalo » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 5:40 PM UTC

Back in 2000, when I was in high school, I developed a trojan similar to netbus and sub7, but just to use it in the school comp labs. The objective was only to have fun. Telling my friends their login passwords, controling their pcs, (screen streaming, key logging, file management, mouse and kb control, some nice screen effects like making the screen move like ocean waves, launch programs, it was fun, lol). There were like 200 machines connected. The infection was simple (auto-installed in services/run) and later it was even network-automated (when I got the admin pass). Then, I handed the commanding program to some friends who used it a little bit too uch. We even had the net admins credentials, so we started to get some extra benefits (like internet outside the internet lab, etc). The admins realized what was happening, and started to use Norton ghost in every pc, first once a week (before it was once every 2 weeks), then, as the infections didnt stop and they started to get very paranoid, they run Norton ghost every single day. It all ended when they discovered a copy of the the source code I had given to a friend of mine. They confronted him, but luckly he took the blame (as he later told me, it was very dumb of him to have saved a copy in his own account. But he managed to convince them that it was just a learning project that went little bit too far. They reprimanded but nothing serious happened to him. So, he is still one of my closest friends,=)

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

#56

Post by corin_ » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 5:49 PM UTC

dak1 wrote: post #54

dsrguru wrote: post #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 peo…

I noticed that too. There's no reason to not write simply "Taiwan," since that won't offend anyone's sensibilities.

I've told this story once or twice on HN before so apologies for anyone re-reading it, but it seems relevant: I was doing some IPTV stuff in China a couple of years ago and we were warned that, among the things the government would be watching our streams for, was use of the word "Taiwan". We absolutely weren't allowed to use it, instead using "Chinese Taipei".

So I'd suggest it could offend some people :)

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

#57

Post by jes5199 » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 5:54 PM UTC

Yeah, when I was at boarding school (high school), we had a LAN in the dorms full of everybody's shiny new Windows 95 desktops. So everybody just had SMB shares, and nobody was careful about what they clicked on. I put a trojan exe with the icon made to look like a text file in mine. Someone clicked on it, and then I popped up a dialog box that said "Hello! You've got a trojan. Open notepad and let's talk about it" and he typed into notepad and I watched with the keyboard sniffer and answered back by injecting keypresses. (I couldn't see video of the screen - I think I could take screenshots, though) I learned a lot about networking that year.

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

#58

Post by sukuriant » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 6:00 PM UTC

science_robot wrote: post #40

Feoh wrote: post #25

This article REALLY makes me wish I could turn on my Mac laptops built in camera and microphone.

You can't? Here's a MacRuby script that can take a photo with your webcam: https://github.com/pioz/snappy .

Now, given the content of the article a moment ago, the question becomes: "Should I trust science_robot? Or is this a trojan?"

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

#59

Post by dsrguru » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 6:16 PM UTC

corin_ wrote: post #56

dak1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that too. There's no reason to not write simply "Taiwan," since that won't offend anyone's sensibilities.

I've told this story once or twice on HN before so apologies for anyone re-reading it, but it seems relevant: I was doing some IPTV stuff in China a couple of years ago and we were warned that, among the things the government would be watching our streams for, was use of the word "Taiwan". We absolutely weren't allowed to use it, instead using "Chinese Taipei". So I'd suggest it could offend some people :)

I spent half a year in China, and I didn't find the word Taiwan as a location offensive to anyone. Could it have been the case that you weren't allowed to say Taiwan specifically when referring to it as a political entity? I was under the impression that Chinese Taipei is the compromise name the two governments agreed on using when referring to Taiwan as an independent entity in sporting events, since having an independent team called Taiwan would not be compatible with China's position that Taiwan belongs to China. However, when referring to Taiwan geographically as the author of this article did, I never once heard Chinese people say Chinese Taipei (neither 中华台北 nor 中国台北). I think in general when people refer to a country by its capital (e.g. Washington or Beijing) they're specifically referring to the country's government. So it makes sense that people wouldn't use Chinese Taipei to mean the whole island of Taiwan if they're not talking about the ROC but rather just the region. I found that people just referred to the island of Taiwan as 台湾 (Taiwan), but certain Chinese government propaganda did the Taiwan, China thing like the author of this article. A video they showed us on an Air China flight showed a photograph of Taipei and labeled it as 中国台湾省台北市 (Taipei, Taiwan Province, China).

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

#60

Post by oz » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 6:18 PM UTC

simonbrown wrote: post #42

Andrenid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

IIRC, Sub7 had a tool which did this. You could also 'pack' the executable.

My infection vector of choice was embedding it into fake resumes and sending it to job ads...ahh, the memories...