Oh the NT4.0 days. When we found out about the "*" feature, we spammed each other and everyone like crazy. A few days later the admin got very mad, as he found the domain controller showing hundreds of stupid messages that he had to dismiss one by one. It took him a few more days to figure out how to disable the messenger service. In the meantime someone found out that the sender and receiver displayed in the messagebox were actually included in the payload of the "protocol" and not verified by the receiver. So someone cobbled together a little tool that was even more fun.
Saying “sup” with `net send`
51–60 of 144 posts
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#52The command that got me in trouble was shutdown /i
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#53we used to do similar with the Mac's ability to speak using the command 'say'. we'd ssh into a computer we knew someone to be sitting and have it 'say' something while using their name. at least, until one day, the 'say' app was not longer available!
Us too. And if the sound was off, we could just turn up the volume with `osascript` commands!
Luckily, the internal speaker on the Macs were decent enough so you could do this even if there were no speakers connected.
By designating the voice, you could even have multiple "people" talking to the user. It got annoying quite quickly to be on the receiving end
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#54I worked for Microsoft during those times doing security for Windows.
In the early 90s employees still occasionally used the Messenger service (the service behind “net send”) for messaging. It was originally intended for alerts like print job completion or server powering down, but it became widely abused.
It could actually be used over the internet if the target machine was addressable, eg had a non-rfc1518 address.
We started getting lots of complaints about abuse in the mid 90s as the web was taking off, and changed our best practice recommendations to disable that service; it was not mission critical.
Most of the low level NetBIOS services were designed naively before people thought much about security; we eventually disabled or removed most of them.
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#55>When I was in junior high, my friends and I discovered that a Command Prompt command called net send was enabled on our school network
I knew some folks who did that as well. Unfortunately I was not in the set of folks who could get away with such nonsense. You were incredibly privileged, and need to be mindful of that for the rest of your life.
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#56Lots of memories, very similar experiences. Fun detail: net send * only broadcasts to machines in the same working group, and since we had classes where each student had their own machine and each class its own group, we could actually use it to broadcast messages to our class, and no one else. We also gave self-chosen names to our machines and used net send as a reasonably practical live chat system during classes.
I also told a friend in another school about the command, and their attempt also ended up sending a message to every machine in a district with over a dozen schools. We knew it would go to the whole school based on the group settings, we were still surprised that it went to other schools as well (still haven't really figured out how that worked). Luckily for them, nothing got disabled, and they kept using net send as a bilateral chat system happily ever after :)
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#57I was working a tech conference, probably around 2001, with about a hundred PCs networked together. A colleague of mine intended to send a simple "net send" message to only my workstation, just as a joke. He messed up the syntax and the popup appeared on every PC in the conference, including the giant screen in the main conference hall. The message: "Fuck you" . He was fired the next day. (Don't feel bad for the guy.…
https://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard > Long before FreeBSD, Jordan K. Hubbard earned a spot in Internet history in 1987 when he accidentally attempted to broadcast an rwall message to every machine on the Internet. He stopped it once he realized what was happening, but not before he & the other UC Berkeley network administrators were flooded with complaints.
Got in trouble for something similar in middle school, actually. I would bike over to the high school for my robotics club, and some of the older members had written a privilege escalation script for the Windows machines. So, I brought it on a flash drive to my technology class the next day and ran 'shutdown -i' with admin privs. Being young and stupid, I broadcast a reboot message to all ~700 machines connected on the network, and got a fairly thorough talking-to...
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#58Ah, yes, back where network security was an oxymoron
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#59This brings back good memories from High School. Here's a bunch of things we used to do:
1. Set fun messages on all the HP Printers: https://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/jetdirecthack
2. Bypass firewall restrictions by setting http:// to https:// (later had to resort to SSH tunneling using Putty). Got me banned from our library for a month when I was on Facebook and a teacher passed by.
3. Our student directory set a cookie to a 6 digit identifier in the cookie. We could access any student's grades and details by just setting it to another ID, or looking at their lunch card.
4. During finals we wouldn't be allowed to see our grades until after all the finals were submitted into our grading portal. Somebody picked up on the fact that if you stop the page load before it finished that the grades would show up. Using JS to block our grades after they loaded didn't stop even the least technical people.
5. Some of our labs had monitoring software to make sure we were working. We could just kill that process and they would lose access.
6. Invert MacOS screen colors using Control + Option + Command + 8. Teachers didn't know how to recover from this and would resort to restoring the entire Mac.
7. CTRL + ALT + Down to flip the Windows screens. Again caused issues for a lot of people who didn't know this shortcut.
What a bunch of troublemakers we were...
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#60This brings back memories of sneaking a C compiler onto a classroom computer in high school and writing a program which issued ten thousand net-sends to a bully's computer. IIRC, the next send window popped over every other window and it effectively denial of service attacked his UI. The options where to click thousands of times or restart the computer. Well, it was pretty easy to rerun the program once his was restarted and let's just say he didn't take it well. It was a blessing that net send doesn't show sender information.