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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

Oh, my first internet access was through one of those in 1991 at college! Found a cool exploit that let me anonymously broadcast messages to anyone. Sure freaked out a lot of people. Was fun cause you'd get to see the effects of your action in real time because it was a bunch of people in the same room on shared terminals.

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Around '84 doing seismic data. We just got a terminal in the office that would allow you to monitor the jobs running on the IBM mainframes downstairs. Completely new tech to all of us. It had a command line message capability. Because it was quite easy to send to all instead of just your recipient, one marriage ended rather suddenly. Seeing the effects of your actions with new tech in real time indeed.

Working at a hedge fund with multiple locations, the founder insisted that mail to “staff” would reach everyone at the local office and mail to “all” would reach everyone (in all offices).

One afternoon (in the middle of the trading day), we got a weird email with an empty body and a bunch of nonsense email addresses. Turns out some poor trader wrote an online dating email, but pasted/wrote the mail in the cc line, resulting in all of us learning that he thought “you don’t seem like all the other girls”, which was sent to you@, don’t@, seem@, and the dreaded all@.

Reminds me of WinPopup spam on Windows 95

Nice, reminds me of my high school computer lab. I wrote a trojan horse in VB6 and distributed it among the lab PCs somehow, then from mine I would open and close peoples CD trays, turn their monitor off, send them to... questionable websites where they would swear it wasn't them! Haha, good times.

A friend and I were able to phish passwords from nearly the entire school we went to with VB6 - the school (board) used active directory for logins on a shoddy network where some switches would often just drop all traffic to a random port for any length of time, meaning a PC would lose connection to the AD server at random. The kicker was that attempting a login after the connection was dropped greeted you with a "could not connect to //SCHOOL_BOARD//SCHOOL_NAME/PC_NAME" to which the solution was reboot the PC and it would work again (99% of the time, anyways). The other kicker was the background image and login domain were the same for every single computer at a single school. We exploited this; we created a full-screen/un-exitable UI with the same background image behind a form simulating the normal login screen. We would first login to our own account and run the program (there were no login limits either), at which point someone else later through the day would sit down and try to login. The credentials that got typed in were added to a .txt in my own user folder before the user rebooted the "non-functional" system. Of all the dumb shit we did, that's probably the only thing we never got caught doing, and probably because we never did anything nefarious with them.

Ha - did the same phishing thing with our RM Nimbuses in the school computer lab. Wrote a turbo pascal program that showed the same login UI as the Nimbus. Logged into my own account on all machines and ran the program. When someone "logged in", it wrote their username and pw to a text file, and rebooted the machine (which got the user to the real login screen). Never got caught for that either, but also don't remember doing anything malicious with the info - I think it was more about the fun of the challenge :)

“Cool exploit“? Like net send? :)

I was banned from the school computer suites several times for (ab)using net send. Good times.

On our high-school network, the Guest account had NET SEND privileges. It was somehow less chaotic than one might expect.

We had a single shared T1 pipe for the whole district. Which was enough for email and stuff, but when web browsers got popular, it was suddenly woefully inadequate.

So I figured out I could NET SEND * SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 9 MINUTES OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE YOUR WORK AND LOG OUT and after a flurry of traffic, the network fell to nearly-idle. I could max out the T1 with whatever I needed to do for a few minutes, then NET SEND * SERVER ROOM POWER RESTORED and nobody would be the wiser.

The admin did go check on the "flaky UPS" a few times before looking closely at the message. Had a good laugh and told me not to use it too often.

This is along the lines of my early days learning about computers at school. I saw executables were filled with weird junk when looked at in a text viewer. So I'd load a little of that junk in a file and add

CRITICAL DISK ERROR. TURN OFF SYSTEM TO AVOID CATASTROPHIC DATA LOSS

and then printed it out to a system printer students didn't have access too. So you got a page of random symbols and that error.

Little did I know the company adding more computers to the network was there that day and the guy panicked and had the system shut down, it was down the next day too. I never did ask what happened to bring attention to myself, and this was before we had individual accounts in the system.

A great story and true BSOD material!

BOFH?

Thanks. This was what I was going for but my brain had other ideas.

I remember someone getting a bit wild with their netsend and accidentally spamming the entire school district, including the administration. We also found out that you could DoS your instructor with enough messages.

the key "feature" of the exploit was the ability to send messages anonymously. the unix commands "write" and "wall" allow you to send a message to any users terminal.

apparently "wall" has a switch "-n" to hide the sender

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/99460/sending-messa...

for windows there was "net send" which could be exploited by a tool called NetSendFaker, but this was 1991, so i doubt that already existed.

There was a time on some UNIXes where you could just write to other people's ttys, no write/wall needed, just echo >/dev/...

Making write/wall sgid, and restricting tty write access to that group, was a significant security upgrade back in the day.

I was able to use samba to generate these messages such that they looked like they came from other users in the lab. We had a lot of fun with that.

I remember in the mid to late 90's when you could get spam from outside of your network via net send. Happy days...

Wall

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