WinPopup (2001) | Hacker News Reader

WinPopup (2001)

susam.net

67 pointssusam32 comments

When I was in high school, we abused "net send" and managed to blast a "all your base are belong to us" message to every PC on campus.

We suspected it even reached other schools in the district.

Good times.

The funnier part was that it was pretty easy (by compiling some simple code) to abuse the protocol sending out net send packets with spoofed senders ;-)

I did this, to three campuses without realising - My intention was just to send to my classroom.

Oops.

In my younger or customer-service days, I once had an awkward conversation with my manager after a message I'd intended for one person ended up going to everyone in a very prominent credit card issuer with about ten thousand on staff at the time.

The only reason I can imagine for why I wasn't fired was because they didn't really want anyone else getting ideas about what to do with the effectively unsecured Windows 2000 machines on their desks, and giving me a reason to keep shtum about it was considered preferable to not giving me one.

We did this in college within our computer labs. Then someone broadcast it to the entire campus. IT blocked it within a few days, but it was fun in the months before that happened.

Oh god, this reminds me of a horrific meeting.

As IT were the only ones using WinNT we’d set the UPS up to broadcast net send messages to all NT clients if it detected power loss. Unfortunately someone had upgraded the main meeting room’s projector PC to NT without us making that connection. So 5 minutes into the “Of course the company’s fine, ignore the rumours of our impending bankruptcy” meeting with all our major clients, the presentation was interrupted with a big message saying that all the servers were going down in five minutes. Not a good day.

So, was the company fine?

Permanently two weeks from shutting down, zero budget, and worst the sales teams’ laptops weren’t good enough to run the software we were trying to sell. In the end the company was bought out by a large US org; the sudden cash injection was honestly the best thing that could have happened.

Just checked and the product still seems to be around 25 years later, albeit under a different name: https://www.infor.com/products/lx

Similar story...I was in 10th grade, and we had a teacher who, in study hall, would make us all watch a projector of her monitor just reading awful powerpoint slides about whatever topic she was interested in. I wanted to do my homework in that period since I never did homework at home, but she wouldn't allow it. Other people wanted to quietly socialize but couldn't. Everyone hated it.

So on one of the computers in the back of the room, I used windows task scheduler to do something akin to "net send room-6a-teacher COMPUTER MUST BE REBOOTED IMMEDIATELY" every 5 minutes for the duration of the class. The teacher was not very tech savvy, she once claimed to have "deleted regedit, because it looked like a rubiks cube and I don't want games on my computer". She never ended up figuring out why her computer messed up during our class, but it let us have our study hall back as our own.

In 12th grade I told my computer networking teacher that story, and he said basically he knew exactly what was happening, but not who did or why they did, so he didn't want to stick his nose in to a study hall, but "I should have figured it was you". I took it as a compliment of the highest order.

Everything is so stingy and uptight now. Stories like this make me feel like I missed the golden era.

Yeah, there were genuinely malicious actors. But there was also just plain old fun.

So many Windows 2000 machines in my school and I didn't know what power was at my hands...

Unfortunately none of that fun stuff lasted very long. Mostly because word would travel and enough people would know about the things they could mess with. At a certain point is was basically assured that someone would do something exceptionally stupid and get the IT guy to actually figure out how to lock that shit down.

Though they never did figure out how we got local admin access to the machines[1]. That was a fairly large security breach actually... once you have local admin, installing a keylogger that drops its logs onto a hidden network share on the machine is trivial. Personally I stayed out of that because my dad would have murdered me if I ever got caught (the friends of mine who did it did end up getting caught!) Still, I found the local admin password was useful for tweaking settings.

[1] It was simply by dropping a disc in and booting the machines into a password cracker. Was very fast since it used rainbow tables.

I did this too, only my computer lab had the network names labeled on each monitor. So instead of blasting everyone, my friends and I would target other kids, then watch the confusion, which sometimes degraded into chaos

net send * "message" in a batch script loop was even more fun.

I recall working at a company where we had these messages timed to send at certain hours of the day for monitoring tasks.

Hehe I did exactly the same. Got suspended from using the school network for a few months because it flooded the syslog in the Windows 2000 domain controller. Did winpopup use Net send or was it a separate technology?

Oh yeah - when we finally had laid RG-58 coax from downstairs up to the attic around 2000, my mom used Winpopup to tell us kids to stop playing Duke Nukem and come down for dinner.

Good times!

And the Windows XP issue where if you installed a fresh copy, unpatched copy connected to the net. You'd receive spam popup messages.

Which is ironic as you needed to connect to the internet to get the patch.

In 9th grade I discovered WinPopup by cleverly getting through the "Student Vista" lockdown crap and wandering all the applications in System32.

I immediately used it to semi-accidentally send messages to every computer in the school board with my full name attached.

That was my first suspension.

That looks like a far better predecessor of the much missed XP tool, netsend. There was something off charming about Windows 98. It was awful, but charmingly so. The icon of the Jack-in-the-box highlights that well.

My local dentist used to use this as a sort of intercom system. When the hygienist was done cleaning your teeth, she would use winpopup to broadcast a message to let the dentist know that the patient was ready in exam room 6. It made cleanings at least a bit enjoyable.

At one point I was using the WTSSendMessageA API to send messages to our son. The API was called by a custom Windows service I wrote which I’d call over HTTP.

WinPopup was great. We had a similar program on the Windows 3.11 systems using Banyan VINES in the mid-90s that could, uh... send a message to the entire DoD network* if an enterprising person specified "" as the recipient. Bonus: recipients didn't need to be running any specific program to receive the sudden message as an alert box, interrupting whatever they were doing. Doing this on such a large network - which was likely never intended - had bad consequences.

just the branches of the military that happened to be using VINES

Would be nice to see how it looks like when the message is received. And when multiple messages from different computers are received. Anybody has an screenshot?

No screenshot, but when there were several messages you could go through them with the arrow buttons that are grayed out in the screenshot.

Not very advanced but 'good enough'.

Oh, the fun we used to have hacking old windows machines at school. Started with the ping of death, net send, making a desktop screenshot the background and hiding the start menu, getting local admin. Once we found Sub7 and BackOrifice, it was open season... Stupid admins never had a clue what was going on. They should have hired us kids to run the network.

Jeez, this is a blast from the past. I had forgotten all about this program, thanks for bringing attention to it again!

I remember Windows 3.1 had a similar built-in LAN messenger. Forget what the name was. Not WinPopup, obviously.

When I was in junior high school in 2000-2001, our computer lab was Windows 3.1-powered. Being able to chat with anyone on the lab was certainly cool. Of course, I hadn't aware of mIRC :)

The next social network?

I learned this tool the hard way as a freshman in high school. Thought both people had to have the app open to get the messages until the front desk lady thought someone was hacking her computer with vulgar messages. Lol

I got in trouble for using this in 10th grade. It was such a problem they had hire an IT guy to prevent this from happening. Being labeled as a hacker was odd for using a tool that seemed easy to use.

I wrote an app in c that could saturate a 10gbit link with netsend traffic. Those were the days.

brings a tear to my eyes. I ran a local ISP with over 150 subscribers. You can imagine the havoc after folks discovered they all could use WinPopup (since obviously everyone's domain was "WORKGROUP"...

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