There is also Sub7 from the same period: https://web.archive.org/web/20050401072114/http://www.hackpr...
I got revenge couple of months later with a "screensaver" that I've made in Delphi. In reality it would just "crash" with some random error, but actually copy itself on multiple places on the hard drive with windows sounding names, run both as a service and some innocent sounding files etc. It wouldn't show up in task manager. I could send and execute whatever commands I liked. I've deleted his Diablo saves a week later or so, and man he was livid as he wasted months playing. He had no idea what happened as he had two AV programs installed and he was confident it would detect a trojan.
Windows security at that period of time really was a contradiction in terms.
> “ However, use of NetBus has had serious consequences. In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.”
Interesting to read on Wikipedia that work on Sub7 resumed in June this year.
NetBus was the GREATEST Win95/98 remote admin/spying software outside BO.
Network scan? Don’t mind if I do. Huh. So many machines. Let’s see what windows they have open.
alt.sex.grannies (or whatever it was back in the day)
Fire off a message “NO. Turn that off. C’mon, man.”
Actually got a reply back.
“OK. I’m sorry.”
Do the title bar refresh and see it’s closed.
That was my favoritest random memory of NetBus in the wild.
But that kind of stuff is what got me interested in computers and programming back in junior high. Learned the basics of control statements and OOP in a fun engaging way. I made an AOL chatroom mailserver with sendkeys :D and later became more advanced using APIs. These were very much like mIRC but AOL hosted all the files so even better. There were private chatrooms based on just making these things and prewritten libraries floating around. Who remembers genocide.bas?(hey I didn't name it) Anybody have these? I have copies somewhere on a zip drive.
Remember punters? In dialup days you could flood a person with chat messages containing html heading tags that would slow them down rendering to the point they could never catch up. Others eventually found exploits that could crash the app on one message.
The Trojans for AOL were also pretty good. Would capture the password field and once connected open an email in the background and send it wherever, then delete sent. Back then though you could as easily just say you are an admin and ask someone for their password. Your whole neighborhood probably openly sharing through netbeui.
I think it's long enough ago to say I ran an FTP on mirc and the password was like the 5th word on the xdrive free account confirmation page. They started at $2 a referral and I bought a nice 17" ViewSonic monitor to play Quake on in the 8th grade. Other friends bought whole computers. Shut that down when the FTP got hacked and I got a cease and desist letter for 3d studio max, thought the law was coming to break down my door. After that I mellowed out.