111–120 of 231 posts
I’d bet there’s more than a few people here in respectable places now that learnt to code through VB6, Delphi, python, Perl, PHP to write rats and exploit code.
Ah, the memories! I brought this into school and a few of my mates wanted copies. Word got out amongst the teachers that there was some program being used for shenannigans by the pupils. I told everyone do delete it but some didn't realise it'd end up in their recycle bin and the network admin found out. Saturday morning detention material, luckily I didn't got caught :)
There were some fun tools around at that time :) Also there was this Windows bug where by default network sharing was open and of course everybody used a modem so there was no NAT/FW in between. So you could just connect to a random IP and see what's on the disk. (I think there was a tool to find IPs with just that port open.)
There is also Sub7 from the same period: https://web.archive.org/web/20050401072114/http://www.hackpr...
And NetBus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBus
Something about telnet-ing into a service gives that Great Hacker Feel. You're at a command line! But it's not bash, or cmd.exe, it's something specific to that rootkit. There's little easter eggs. Some common escape codes might work, they might not. The prompt changes as you use it.
These days, I don't get many opportunities, but if I can add a very simple line-oriented protocol to a side project I sure will.
Like so many others here this really helped me gain an interest in computers at a young age. It's sad to think that the shit most of us did as kids for fun and learning would land today's children in hot water. I lucked out in Jr High, after getting suspended for 'hacking the school computers' as the computer lab admin caught wind and really encouraged me to learn and provided me with a lot of hands on experience tha…
I was suspended from school for things like this circa 1997. It was all relatively harmless but absolutely against the letter of the law. I wonder what would happen today to a young person exploring computer security and getting caught in shenanigans at school. Would they go to prison?
Pretty sure someone used this to make my CD-ROM eject once, and that was very disconcerting.
Netbus and BO got me in so much trouble as a kid (though honestly I probably should have gotten in a lot more trouble). At school, all the windows machines were locked down with a "security" application called Fortress. I started selling boot floppies that would disable Fortress to teachers, and might have loaded a few of those up with the aforementioned toys. At home, I don't think I paid for internet access at all…
I'd often read phrack even though I didn't really understand programming yet, but there was this one issue that detailed how to trick a bottle recycling machine into giving you unlimited receipts, my local supermarket had the exact machine and I was thinking about doing it to see if it would work, but chickened out because I realized I'd actually be stealing from the owner of the supermarket who everyone in the town was on first name basis with. I always believed everything in the digital was sort of fair play and was really shocked when people started going to jail even for the dumbest thing like grey hat url injection.
The BO payload was so large that it was hard to inject or distribute without pretty obviously being suspicious. A friend developed Fraggle Lite in ASM with separate versions for the network adapter, which became the world's smallest RAT for a while. I never found the Easter egg, but I do remember the original password for our hardcoded users. I wonder if I still have them somewhere...
That fraggle lite?