The hacker handle thread is pretty interesting. But what evil things has 
anyone done? I can tell you about a couple of mine...

Back in the BBS days, I ran The BoycoT BBS in southern california. There was 
this one user, named Fether. His real name was Jon Fether. He was a childish 
flamer. All he did was cause hate and discontent and bashed my BBS saying 
how it sucked and all my users sucked.  I banned him, deleted his account, 
but he kept calling back and re-registering using different user names.  I 
knew he had a GS so one day I took my merlin assembler and wrote a small 
program that set his text to black, his background & border to black, turned 
the sound off, set his boot port to slot 3.  I had a friend of mine upload 
the little gem to my BBS and say it was a cool new utility that did 
such-n-such. Then I sat back and waited for Fether to call. When other 
people called, I chatted with them and told them not to download the file. 
But when Fether called and did a new file scan, this little proggy showed 
up. He immediately downloaded it, posted another flame about how my BBS 
sucked, then logged off.

Nobody heard from him for about 3 weeks.  I thought maybe he was gone for 
good.  Evidently he didn't know about the 3-finger salute that would reset 
the GS back to factory defaults, or he didn't try. When he finally came 
back, he whined about how it just cost him $150 to have his GS repaired. He 
told everyone that he downloaded a file from my BBS that had a "virus" that 
"wiped out his motherboard".

That was worth laughing about for quite a while... 



-- 
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Funny. I just did a google search for "jon fether" and found this...

http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg01444.html

The guy that posted the message was the friend that uploaded the file to my 
BBS as "Fether Bait".


"Terry Olsen" <tolsen64@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:44fb9bfc$0$19631$88260bb3@free.teranews.com...
> The hacker handle thread is pretty interesting. But what evil things has 
> anyone done? I can tell you about a couple of mine...
>
> Back in the BBS days, I ran The BoycoT BBS in southern california. There 
> was this one user, named Fether. His real name was Jon Fether. He was a 
> childish flamer. All he did was cause hate and discontent and bashed my 
> BBS saying how it sucked and all my users sucked.  I banned him, deleted 
> his account, but he kept calling back and re-registering using different 
> user names.  I knew he had a GS so one day I took my merlin assembler and 
> wrote a small program that set his text to black, his background & border 
> to black, turned the sound off, set his boot port to slot 3.  I had a 
> friend of mine upload the little gem to my BBS and say it was a cool new 
> utility that did such-n-such. Then I sat back and waited for Fether to 
> call. When other people called, I chatted with them and told them not to 
> download the file. But when Fether called and did a new file scan, this 
> little proggy showed up. He immediately downloaded it, posted another 
> flame about how my BBS sucked, then logged off.
>
> Nobody heard from him for about 3 weeks.  I thought maybe he was gone for 
> good.  Evidently he didn't know about the 3-finger salute that would reset 
> the GS back to factory defaults, or he didn't try. When he finally came 
> back, he whined about how it just cost him $150 to have his GS repaired. 
> He told everyone that he downloaded a file from my BBS that had a "virus" 
> that "wiped out his motherboard".
>
> That was worth laughing about for quite a while...
>
>
> -- 
> Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
> 



-- 
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Terry Olsen wrote:
> The hacker handle thread is pretty interesting. But what evil
> things has anyone done? I can tell you about a couple of mine...

I was tempted to divulge some of my past hacker-day activities in the
"What was your handle" thread, but decided not to.  But since you've
started this.. sure, why not..

Actually, now that I've gone through this personal history, I recall
now that my handle was MAD MAX for a little while in the beginning.  I
then went by the handle "TELE-HACKER", which I chose because I did a
lot of hacking on TELENET.

This is a bit long, but it's all true as best I can remember it.  A
couple things I'd like to say first...

ONE - Although I did a lot of hacking, I was not malicious.  I had a
policy of being passive once I was in.  Others that I knew WERE
malicious, and would start deleting disk packs and would continuously
spool "You have been hacked!" messages to all the printers.  I guess I
wasn't quite that dumb, and that policy saved my ass on several
occasions.

TWO - I was stupid for doing a lot of this crap.  I hope you don't hold
it against me now.  Except for the two college stunts, I stopped
hacking and phreaking at age 18 (early 1988).  By that time, I knew I
was lucky and I decided it was best to quit while I was ahead.  And I
was damn lucky on several occasions.  Things could have gone a lot
worse.


 ... It all started when I got a used Hayes MicroModem II ...

* Phreaking

After I installed the Hayes MicroModem II in my Apple //e, I started
calling BBS's, many of which were long distance.  That first month, my
dad got a $600 phone bill.  I quickly discovered phreaking from the
BBS's, and my parents never got a long distance charge again (from me,
anyways.)   A little later, I got an AppleCat modem, and wrote my own
war dialers.  Yes, the movie "Wargames" was a big inspiration.  I
recall watching the movie constantly with one particular friend (or at
least playing it while we banged on the Apple keyboard.)  Anyhow,
MetroPhone was the target of choice, as their access codes were only 5
digits long.  The program was pretty simple - dial the MetroPhone
access number, enter a random 5-digit code, then dial a telenet access
number.  If the code was good, then the call would go through and the
modem would get a carrier detect from the telenet system.  Save the
code to a file and continue.  I recall that I could get at least 2 or 3
new codes by letting that run overnight.  (I was lucky enough to have
my own phone line, by the way..)

* Retaliation Virus

Similar to your "virus" program, I did the same thing.  A friend of a
friend wanted to borrow my disks so he could copy them.  I will refer
to him as "Mr.IDIOT" (he appears a couple more times below.)  I was
pretty reluctant and I didn't really care for the guy, but my friend
and him begged, etc, so I finally gave in.  I lent him my collection.
Several days later I wanted it back.  I went over to his house to find
that my disks were all over the floor, out of their sleeves.  I
collected them up and returned home.  Turned out that about half of
them were unreadable.  Some bent, some with fingerprints on the media.
Man, that made me mad.  I mean, I really wanted to hurt the guy.
Avoiding my impulse to physically hurt him, I wrote a program that
would wipe all disks on the system when it was run.  I got him to
download it off a BBS I was running, and he did run it.  That was about
as much damage I did in retaliation.  But as luck would have it, his
own stupidity would catch him later - see "The CIA" below.

* Crashing BBS's

There were only a couple times where I had the impulse to crash a BBS.
Honestly, I don't even recall the circumstances now.  But I programmed
two types of programs to do it.  The more complex was a program that
would connect and continuously create new user accounts until their
disk was full (remember, many BBS's ran off a pair of floppy disks).
The more simple program, but usually quite effective, was to simply
connect to the BBS and then start sending all the ascii codes $00 to
$FF continuously.  Quite often, that would crash the BBS.

* Dumpster Diving

This was an activity I shared with a couple people.  For the most part,
it was an exercise in the collection of credit card receipts.  At one
point, I had a collection, but I never tried to use them.  One friend I
knew, did try.  He ordered some expensive piece of computer equiptment
and had it mailed to a house near his.  This was during the summer, and
he timed it so that the package arrived when the neighbors in question
were not home.  He then collected the box at night.  I think he only
did it once, but at the time it was something I wasn't prepared to try.

* The Source

I had another friend that was a little strange.  For example, he didn't
do drugs but he would tell me about how he would basically choke
himself (restricting blood to his head) while he held his breath.  A
strange guy, but he was good at heart and was into Apple II's, but not
so much into programming.  He liked getting on to "The Source" service
to have "hot chats" with others.  He would adapt to be the opposite sex
as the person he was chatting with, though he did prefer to chat with
females at the other end.  We used trial logins to get access The
Source and then would chat with someone.  We programmed some macro's
into Proterm to send text strings like "SYSTEM ERROR: You were
disconnected. Please re-enter your account name" then "Please re-enter
your password" if they complied to the first prompt.  Then we would say
"Hello? you still there?  I got disconencted." or something like that
to try and play down what just happened.  We got quite a few people to
fall for it, and got free account/passwords out of it.

* The FBI

Me and quite a few others in my area were adept at phreaking and
getting new codes.  One day a message appeared on a local BBS that said
a new long distance company was available, gave some access numbers and
a few valid codes to use.  It quickly became used by quite a few.  I
forget the name of the "company", but it ended with "Star" if I recall.
 Like "TeleStar" or something like that.  After a couple months, and I
recall using it somewhat, I got a call from a friend.  It was the very
last day of school, too.  Summer break ahead.  On the phone, my friend
said "Dude, I got home and there were FBI agents at my house.  They
took my computer, all my disks, everything.  They had a clipboard with
names on it, and yours was on it."  When I asked him "What? Why are
they getting you?" he told me "TeleStar was fake.  It was a sting
operation set up by the FBI to catch phreakers."  I about crapped my
pants.  I felt that sinking feeling in my gut, and I started to erase
all my phreaking disks.  But nothing happened.  No agents arrived at my
house.  Apparently, they decided to make examples out of a few and did
not persue the entire list of offenders.  I was lucky.  That was the
day I stopped phreaking.  My friend was pretty visible/high-profile in
our high school, as his father was a teacher there.  My friend was
fined $5000 and didn't get his computer back for a year.  I remember
him saying "Thank god they didn't find the credit cards", a collection
he had from late night dumpster diving.  Yeah, good thing they didn't
find that.

* Walden (Free) Software

This was terrible and out-right theft.  Sometimes you can be pretty
stupid as a teenager, and, on some occasions, I was no exception.
During the 80's, Walden Books opened up a chain of software stores
called "Walden Software".  I applied and got a job at a Walden Software
store in our town.  As a side note, I recall a man in his 40's who came
in a lot.  I was told that we were not to sell him anything.  Turned
out that he had purchased lots of software (not games, but the more
expensive stuff like Microsoft C, Turbo C/Pascal, Excel, etc) but
always returned it for a refund.  They noticed that he had returned
EVERYTHING he purchased.  They concluded he was copying it and getting
his money back.  Anyhow, I was aquainted with some other kids at the
time, whom I met over BBS's, and invited them to visit the store for a
little 5-finger discount.  I was told by the manager that *TWO*
employees have to witness a theft in order to confront the customer
about it.  But on weekends it was usually just me and this manager
woman in the store.  Next, I had my friends come into the store and I
acted like I did not know them.  The manager walked out to go to the
bathroom and was gone for a good 5 minutes.  I handed a couple Walden
Software bags to the guys and they went around stuffing it with all
sorts of software (Turbo C, games, and some other expensive software
packages.)  They then walked out of the store with the bags stuffed.  I
recall nearly crapping my pants because my friends were walking out of
the store at the same time the manager lady was coming back.  They
walked right past each other, but I don't think the manager really
noticed the bags.  If she had, I'm sure she would have really suspected
something.  There was a ton of software/boxes in them.  Probably one or
two thousand dollars worth.  Anyhow, we got away with it.  I met up
with the guys later that night, at a local park, and they had their car
trunk filled with software packages.  I took my share and that was
that.

* TELENET

I don't know if they are still around these days, but Telenet was/is a
packet-switching network owned by GTE.  They had local access numbers
across the USA.  You would connect and get an "@" prompt.  There were
basically two options from there.  One was to enter "mail" to get into
the mail system, the other was to enter "C####" to connect to a
computer (#### is a number, where the first three characters were the
area code of the system.)  For example "C2031" was the first system in
area code 203 (Connecticut).  Sort of like a domain name, but it was
just a number.  But they weren't all nicely numbered starting from 1.
Perhaps "C20396" would be the first one to connect to a computer in the
203 series.  If not computer was connected, Telenet would send a "No
system at that address" error message (or something similar to that..
it's been a while).  So I wrote a program that would connect and try
addresses in each area code.  If it didn't get an error message, my
program would log the "welcome" message, that was displayed by the
remote system, to disk.  Usually it was an identification of the system
(VAX/VMS, PrimeOS, etc) followed by a login prompt.  I had also
discovered a lot of "default" passwords for getting into these systems,
like username/password "field" and "service" for getting into VMS
systems. (They were supposed to be changed after a system was
installed, but often they were not - and they had full admin
privledges!)  We got into many systems that way.  One special one was a
system owned by Black & Decker.  It was cool because they had a "dial
out" program on their system that could be used to call other
computers!  We called BBS's all over the country with it, and Black &
Decker picked up the tab!  That lasted for several months (we didn't
noticibly abuse it), until "Mr.IDIOT" found out about it   Within a few
days of his abuse, it was noticed and we were shut out.

Besides Black and Decker, I recall a VMS system we got into that turned
out to be part of a Hospital system.  We sent emails to the admin
saying that we had broke into the system and that we would be happy to
help them increase security.  We actually got a reply and they seemed
somewhat amused, at least initially, and did not shut us out right
away.  But it was probably just another day or so and we were kicked
out.  They patched the default field/service login and we hadn't
created any new accounts on that system.

As I said before, when you connect to telenet you can type in "mail" to
get into the mail system.  You get a login prompt, and you can enter
the username and password "phones" to get into a national directory
listing of all the telenet access numbers.  So one day I was sitting at
that mail login prompt and started entering random words for the
username and password.  Cars/cars, houses/houses, people/people.. Boom-
people/people got me into People Magazine's email account.  Some
writers would email their stories to them for publication.  We thought
about modifying some stuff, to see if it ended up in the printed
edition, but we didn't.  We read email and checked in on it now and
then for a period of several months.  Then "Mr.IDIOT" got wind of it
and started using it.  Mr.IDIOT decided that it would be a good idea to
do something stupid, true to his form.  That leads into the next
story....

* The CIA

There I was, sitting (ironically enough) in computer class.  As I was
sitting at a VT-220 terminal, a message popped up on the screen "Chris
- Report to the principal's office immediately."  Huhhhh???  What could
this be about?  I went to the principal's office and was met by a
couple police officers and two men from the CIA.  "Please come in" one
of the CIA agents said.  In the office was a little couch and table,
and on the table was a printout with some parts highlighted in yellow.
"What do you know about this?" I was asked.  I looked at the printout
and started reading.  Uh huh.. Telenet.. mail.. people's mail account.
A bomb threat, mentioning our high school.  Nice.  I looked up,
starting to get scared, and immediately came clean with them.  "This is
people magazine's account.  I was the one that got into it, but I
didn't write this message.  But I know who did."  I pointed, without
much remorse at all, to Mr.IDIOT.  He left school that day in handcuffs
and I never saw him again.  From what I heard, after the incident, his
parents put him into a private school for delinquint kids.  As for me,
I never heard from the CIA again.  They probably left me alone because
(A) I wasn't the person they were looking for, and (B) I basically
solved their case on the spot.  They were only interested in the bomb
threat.  That was basically the day I stopped hacking.  Though, if you
keep reading, you'll notice that I did do a couple "stunts" in college.

When I later told this story to some friends, they were a little
incredulous that the CIA was involved.  As I understood it, the CIA was
involved because it was a bomb threat and it was over state lines.
(People magazine, who reported it, versus our high school, in a
different state.)  Whether or not that's why, I don't know - but it was
the CIA that showed up.  In investigating it, the CIA was just being
methodical about it.  Our high school was mentioned in the bomb threat,
so that's where they went.  They talked to the principal and asked her
"Who in this school is capable of doing this?"  The principal appealed
to the current high-school senior student in charge of the computer
room (a new one each year, and no, after this, I wasn't picked!).  He
gave them a list of people he thought had the ability, and my name was
first on the list.  Case closed.

* Breaking into the college computer...

Well, it was more taking advantage of an opportunity than actually
breaking in.  I entered college in the fall in 1988.  I quickly became
friends with a set of students that were good programmers.  We all knew
who the "real" programmers were and who were the "Script Kiddies" (as
they might be called today.)  One of my friends got into college at age
14 on a math scholarship, and is quite bright.  I'm still friends with
him..  Anyhow, one of these friends worked as a teachers assistant and
computer lab monitor.  I had already told him about some of my earlier
hacking stories, so he knew I was (at least) somewhat good at it.  One
day, late afternoon, he called me from the computer lab.  "Chris, Mr.
xyz left his account logged in.  Do you know what to do?"  (I won't use
Mr. xyz's real name, but he was an employee of the school's data
center.)  "Yeah, I'll be right there." I said.  When I got there, sure
enough, the guy left his account logged in.  It was a VAX/VMS system
and Mr xyz had admin privledges.  So I entered "SET DEFAULT/PRIV=ALL"
to get all privs, then proceeded to create a new admin account called
"kudos".  Then I logged Mr. xyz out.  It was basically for fun and to
see how long it took the admins to find and disable the account.  We
would usually dial in remotely to check the account, or sometimes we
would go to a terminal (never the same one we were just using) and
login quickly to check it.  We were very passive with it, because we
knew that if for some reason we did get caught, it wouldn't be as bad
as if we were actually up to "bad" things (like trying to get into
grades, deleting things, etc.)  We had the account for a good six
months before the crap finally hit the fan.

It was about the middle of the Spring '89 semester when the fan was
hit.  I was in the computer lab one evening doing some programming.
(Side note: I was warned a few times about CPU usage - I liked to write
Cellular Automata simulators and I would run them at night, fully using
one of the two CPU's on the system.  I had it queued to start each
night and save/stop in the morning.. Heh..)  At the end of my
programming that night, I logged out and went to another terminal
across the room.  I think there was only one or two other people there
at the time, probably around 8pm.  I logged into the "kudos" account to
see if it was still there.  It was.  I hardly logged into it that much
anymore.  After I logged out, someone I had never seen before came into
the room.  He was in his 40's, heavy set, with a beard.  He walked
right up to me.  "Are you Chris?" he asked.  "Yeah..." I said, sort of
confused.  "Please come with me." he said.  We went to his office in
the data center, through one of the doors I never saw used before.
Like I said, I never saw this guy before, but it turned out he had a
Ph.D. and was the director of the data center.  He proceeded to tell me
that he had detected the account when it was created but wanted to find
the culprit(s).  He wrote software to log and analyze all the
logins/locations and correlate them to other student logins and
locations.  Eventually, he narrowed the list of names down to me.  As I
think about it, there wasn't a lot of students that dialed in to access
the system, but I was one of them, and the kudos account was accessed
that way too.  That probably narrowed down the list quite a bit.  Then
he probably noticed that the kudos account was usually accessed shortly
after my account logged out.  Anyhow, he had me.

"Do you know the seriousness of this offence?" he asked me.  No, I
didn't really know.. "You can be expelled from the school." he said.
Then I was surprised at his next line of questioning.  "Who helped you
do this?" and "How did you get in?".  Turned out that he did not
beleive, initially, that I was even capable of doing what was done.
That annoyed me a little, so I started telling him things like "It's
easy.  I used to do it all the time in high school." then I told him
the story and the commands I used to do it.  He had a hard time
beleiving me, but I told him that we had a PDP-11 in our high school
and it's all right there in the manuals.  I think he was looking for a
deeper conspiracy than it was.  Anyhow, whenever I get caught, I tend
to come clean with "the authorities" and not lie or be deceptive.  They
usually appreciate that and tend to go easier on you than if you try
and lie and/or misdirect them.  So me and my friend were caught.  What
next?

Luck was on our side (or my friends, really.)  My friend was well liked
by the faculty and they saw me as a promising student getting A's in
all math and computer classes.  If they expelled me, they would have to
expel my friend too.  One math teacher in particular stood up for us
and saved our asses.  In the end, we were not expelled.  We had to do
"community service" in the form of going to all the computer and math
classes and give a lecture on the importance of keeping your password
secret, not letting other people use your account(s), and ALWAYS ALWAYS
log off the system when you're done.  Ya, we were lucky.  We basically
got a slap on the wrist.  Our saving grace was that we were completely
passive with the acocunt.  We didn't try deleting things, getting into
other students directories, or trying to get into grades, etc.  If we
had, we probably would have been kicked out of college.

* The last hack ...

My last hack was in college.  At that time, I was using a 386/20 PC and
my dad used the Apple //e back at home for word processing.  I wrote a
new war dialer in Turbo C and started scanning all the phone numbers in
our college town.  There were a few systems that I got into, but
nothing exciting.  Except for one.  I found a VAX/VMS system with the
default accounts (Field/Service) open.  I got in.  Turned out it was
the local cable company.  I played around with it for a few days,
exploring the system.  At the time, I was living in a house off campus
with 5 other guys, on the third floor of a big house.  It was actually
6 seperate rooms with a common hallway and bathroom.  Most of us ate on
campus.  Sometimes we played cards ("set back") into the wee hours of
the morning.  Most of us, too, were into computers and programming.
One guy found out about the cable company login I had.  He asked if he
could play around with it.  He seemed like a half decent guy and I gave
him the phone number and login.  As it turned out he was not the
passive type.  This guy went into their system and started deleting
everything in sight.  It didn't bring the system down, but it did cause
some problems.  After he did it, he banged on my door to wake me up,
and told me what happened and that he was disconnected.  When he tried
calling back, someone was picking up the phone.  So he decided to go
down a couple streets and call the number from a payphone.  He called
and some guy answered, but didn't say anything.  He could hear
breathing, though.  So he let the payphone receiver dangle and walked
away, saying he hoped that if any traces were done, it would lead to
there and not his own phone line.  I recall the cable company
advertising some sort of Wrestling special to be broadcast about a week
from then.  That wresting special was postponed, and I am pretty sure
it was because of what he did.  As a side note, I also remember finding
a program on the system that would let you enter text to be
displayed/scrolled at the bottom of the TV screen for any particular
channel.  But it was password protected itself, and I couldn't figure a
way into it.  Probably for the best, because that would be VERY
tempting to use.


Well, that's what I remember.. 
// CHRIS

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Chris Morse wrote:

> * TELENET
>
> I don't know if they are still around these days, but Telenet was/is a
> packet-switching network owned by GTE.

I doubt it, and GTE itself is gone too (they got eaten up by Bell Atlantic 
and thus became Verizon, which coincidentally is my current ISP).

-uso.

Chris Morse wrote:
> Terry Olsen wrote:
>> The hacker handle thread is pretty interesting. But what evil
>> things has anyone done? I can tell you about a couple of mine...
> 
> I was tempted to divulge some of my past hacker-day activities in the
> "What was your handle" thread, but decided not to.  But since you've
> started this.. sure, why not..
> 
> Actually, now that I've gone through this personal history, I recall
> now that my handle was MAD MAX for a little while in the beginning.  I
> then went by the handle "TELE-HACKER", which I chose because I did a
> lot of hacking on TELENET.
> 
> This is a bit long, but it's all true as best I can remember it.  A
> couple things I'd like to say first...
> 
> ONE - Although I did a lot of hacking, I was not malicious.  I had a
> policy of being passive once I was in.  Others that I knew WERE
> malicious, and would start deleting disk packs and would continuously
> spool "You have been hacked!" messages to all the printers.  I guess I
> wasn't quite that dumb, and that policy saved my ass on several
> occasions.
> 
> TWO - I was stupid for doing a lot of this crap.  I hope you don't hold
> it against me now.  Except for the two college stunts, I stopped
> hacking and phreaking at age 18 (early 1988).  By that time, I knew I
> was lucky and I decided it was best to quit while I was ahead.  And I
> was damn lucky on several occasions.  Things could have gone a lot
> worse.
> 
> 
>  ... It all started when I got a used Hayes MicroModem II ...
> 
> * Phreaking
> 
> After I installed the Hayes MicroModem II in my Apple //e, I started
> calling BBS's, many of which were long distance.  That first month, my
> dad got a $600 phone bill.  I quickly discovered phreaking from the
> BBS's, and my parents never got a long distance charge again (from me,
> anyways.)   A little later, I got an AppleCat modem, and wrote my own
> war dialers.  Yes, the movie "Wargames" was a big inspiration.  I
> recall watching the movie constantly with one particular friend (or at
> least playing it while we banged on the Apple keyboard.)  Anyhow,
> MetroPhone was the target of choice, as their access codes were only 5
> digits long.  The program was pretty simple - dial the MetroPhone
> access number, enter a random 5-digit code, then dial a telenet access
> number.  If the code was good, then the call would go through and the
> modem would get a carrier detect from the telenet system.  Save the
> code to a file and continue.  I recall that I could get at least 2 or 3
> new codes by letting that run overnight.  (I was lucky enough to have
> my own phone line, by the way..)
> 
> * Retaliation Virus
> 
> Similar to your "virus" program, I did the same thing.  A friend of a
> friend wanted to borrow my disks so he could copy them.  I will refer
> to him as "Mr.IDIOT" (he appears a couple more times below.)  I was
> pretty reluctant and I didn't really care for the guy, but my friend
> and him begged, etc, so I finally gave in.  I lent him my collection.
> Several days later I wanted it back.  I went over to his house to find
> that my disks were all over the floor, out of their sleeves.  I
> collected them up and returned home.  Turned out that about half of
> them were unreadable.  Some bent, some with fingerprints on the media.
> Man, that made me mad.  I mean, I really wanted to hurt the guy.
> Avoiding my impulse to physically hurt him, I wrote a program that
> would wipe all disks on the system when it was run.  I got him to
> download it off a BBS I was running, and he did run it.  That was about
> as much damage I did in retaliation.  But as luck would have it, his
> own stupidity would catch him later - see "The CIA" below.
> 
> * Crashing BBS's
> 
> There were only a couple times where I had the impulse to crash a BBS.
> Honestly, I don't even recall the circumstances now.  But I programmed
> two types of programs to do it.  The more complex was a program that
> would connect and continuously create new user accounts until their
> disk was full (remember, many BBS's ran off a pair of floppy disks).
> The more simple program, but usually quite effective, was to simply
> connect to the BBS and then start sending all the ascii codes $00 to
> $FF continuously.  Quite often, that would crash the BBS.
> 
> * Dumpster Diving
> 
> This was an activity I shared with a couple people.  For the most part,
> it was an exercise in the collection of credit card receipts.  At one
> point, I had a collection, but I never tried to use them.  One friend I
> knew, did try.  He ordered some expensive piece of computer equiptment
> and had it mailed to a house near his.  This was during the summer, and
> he timed it so that the package arrived when the neighbors in question
> were not home.  He then collected the box at night.  I think he only
> did it once, but at the time it was something I wasn't prepared to try.
> 
> * The Source
> 
> I had another friend that was a little strange.  For example, he didn't
> do drugs but he would tell me about how he would basically choke
> himself (restricting blood to his head) while he held his breath.  A
> strange guy, but he was good at heart and was into Apple II's, but not
> so much into programming.  He liked getting on to "The Source" service
> to have "hot chats" with others.  He would adapt to be the opposite sex
> as the person he was chatting with, though he did prefer to chat with
> females at the other end.  We used trial logins to get access The
> Source and then would chat with someone.  We programmed some macro's
> into Proterm to send text strings like "SYSTEM ERROR: You were
> disconnected. Please re-enter your account name" then "Please re-enter
> your password" if they complied to the first prompt.  Then we would say
> "Hello? you still there?  I got disconencted." or something like that
> to try and play down what just happened.  We got quite a few people to
> fall for it, and got free account/passwords out of it.
> 
> * The FBI
> 
> Me and quite a few others in my area were adept at phreaking and
> getting new codes.  One day a message appeared on a local BBS that said
> a new long distance company was available, gave some access numbers and
> a few valid codes to use.  It quickly became used by quite a few.  I
> forget the name of the "company", but it ended with "Star" if I recall.
>  Like "TeleStar" or something like that.  After a couple months, and I
> recall using it somewhat, I got a call from a friend.  It was the very
> last day of school, too.  Summer break ahead.  On the phone, my friend
> said "Dude, I got home and there were FBI agents at my house.  They
> took my computer, all my disks, everything.  They had a clipboard with
> names on it, and yours was on it."  When I asked him "What? Why are
> they getting you?" he told me "TeleStar was fake.  It was a sting
> operation set up by the FBI to catch phreakers."  I about crapped my
> pants.  I felt that sinking feeling in my gut, and I started to erase
> all my phreaking disks.  But nothing happened.  No agents arrived at my
> house.  Apparently, they decided to make examples out of a few and did
> not persue the entire list of offenders.  I was lucky.  That was the
> day I stopped phreaking.  My friend was pretty visible/high-profile in
> our high school, as his father was a teacher there.  My friend was
> fined $5000 and didn't get his computer back for a year.  I remember
> him saying "Thank god they didn't find the credit cards", a collection
> he had from late night dumpster diving.  Yeah, good thing they didn't
> find that.
> 
> * Walden (Free) Software
> 
> This was terrible and out-right theft.  Sometimes you can be pretty
> stupid as a teenager, and, on some occasions, I was no exception.
> During the 80's, Walden Books opened up a chain of software stores
> called "Walden Software".  I applied and got a job at a Walden Software
> store in our town.  As a side note, I recall a man in his 40's who came
> in a lot.  I was told that we were not to sell him anything.  Turned
> out that he had purchased lots of software (not games, but the more
> expensive stuff like Microsoft C, Turbo C/Pascal, Excel, etc) but
> always returned it for a refund.  They noticed that he had returned
> EVERYTHING he purchased.  They concluded he was copying it and getting
> his money back.  Anyhow, I was aquainted with some other kids at the
> time, whom I met over BBS's, and invited them to visit the store for a
> little 5-finger discount.  I was told by the manager that *TWO*
> employees have to witness a theft in order to confront the customer
> about it.  But on weekends it was usually just me and this manager
> woman in the store.  Next, I had my friends come into the store and I
> acted like I did not know them.  The manager walked out to go to the
> bathroom and was gone for a good 5 minutes.  I handed a couple Walden
> Software bags to the guys and they went around stuffing it with all
> sorts of software (Turbo C, games, and some other expensive software
> packages.)  They then walked out of the store with the bags stuffed.  I
> recall nearly crapping my pants because my friends were walking out of
> the store at the same time the manager lady was coming back.  They
> walked right past each other, but I don't think the manager really
> noticed the bags.  If she had, I'm sure she would have really suspected
> something.  There was a ton of software/boxes in them.  Probably one or
> two thousand dollars worth.  Anyhow, we got away with it.  I met up
> with the guys later that night, at a local park, and they had their car
> trunk filled with software packages.  I took my share and that was
> that.
> 
> * TELENET
> 
> I don't know if they are still around these days, but Telenet was/is a
> packet-switching network owned by GTE.  They had local access numbers
> across the USA.  You would connect and get an "@" prompt.  There were
> basically two options from there.  One was to enter "mail" to get into
> the mail system, the other was to enter "C####" to connect to a
> computer (#### is a number, where the first three characters were the
> area code of the system.)  For example "C2031" was the first system in
> area code 203 (Connecticut).  Sort of like a domain name, but it was
> just a number.  But they weren't all nicely numbered starting from 1.
> Perhaps "C20396" would be the first one to connect to a computer in the
> 203 series.  If not computer was connected, Telenet would send a "No
> system at that address" error message (or something similar to that..
> it's been a while).  So I wrote a program that would connect and try
> addresses in each area code.  If it didn't get an error message, my
> program would log the "welcome" message, that was displayed by the
> remote system, to disk.  Usually it was an identification of the system
> (VAX/VMS, PrimeOS, etc) followed by a login prompt.  I had also
> discovered a lot of "default" passwords for getting into these systems,
> like username/password "field" and "service" for getting into VMS
> systems. (They were supposed to be changed after a system was
> installed, but often they were not - and they had full admin
> privledges!)  We got into many systems that way.  One special one was a
> system owned by Black & Decker.  It was cool because they had a "dial
> out" program on their system that could be used to call other
> computers!  We called BBS's all over the country with it, and Black &
> Decker picked up the tab!  That lasted for several months (we didn't
> noticibly abuse it), until "Mr.IDIOT" found out about it   Within a few
> days of his abuse, it was noticed and we were shut out.
> 
> Besides Black and Decker, I recall a VMS system we got into that turned
> out to be part of a Hospital system.  We sent emails to the admin
> saying that we had broke into the system and that we would be happy to
> help them increase security.  We actually got a reply and they seemed
> somewhat amused, at least initially, and did not shut us out right
> away.  But it was probably just another day or so and we were kicked
> out.  They patched the default field/service login and we hadn't
> created any new accounts on that system.
> 
> As I said before, when you connect to telenet you can type in "mail" to
> get into the mail system.  You get a login prompt, and you can enter
> the username and password "phones" to get into a national directory
> listing of all the telenet access numbers.  So one day I was sitting at
> that mail login prompt and started entering random words for the
> username and password.  Cars/cars, houses/houses, people/people.. Boom-
> people/people got me into People Magazine's email account.  Some
> writers would email their stories to them for publication.  We thought
> about modifying some stuff, to see if it ended up in the printed
> edition, but we didn't.  We read email and checked in on it now and
> then for a period of several months.  Then "Mr.IDIOT" got wind of it
> and started using it.  Mr.IDIOT decided that it would be a good idea to
> do something stupid, true to his form.  That leads into the next
> story....
> 
> * The CIA
> 
> There I was, sitting (ironically enough) in computer class.  As I was
> sitting at a VT-220 terminal, a message popped up on the screen "Chris
> - Report to the principal's office immediately."  Huhhhh???  What could
> this be about?  I went to the principal's office and was met by a
> couple police officers and two men from the CIA.  "Please come in" one
> of the CIA agents said.  In the office was a little couch and table,
> and on the table was a printout with some parts highlighted in yellow.
> "What do you know about this?" I was asked.  I looked at the printout
> and started reading.  Uh huh.. Telenet.. mail.. people's mail account.
> A bomb threat, mentioning our high school.  Nice.  I looked up,
> starting to get scared, and immediately came clean with them.  "This is
> people magazine's account.  I was the one that got into it, but I
> didn't write this message.  But I know who did."  I pointed, without
> much remorse at all, to Mr.IDIOT.  He left school that day in handcuffs
> and I never saw him again.  From what I heard, after the incident, his
> parents put him into a private school for delinquint kids.  As for me,
> I never heard from the CIA again.  They probably left me alone because
> (A) I wasn't the person they were looking for, and (B) I basically
> solved their case on the spot.  They were only interested in the bomb
> threat.  That was basically the day I stopped hacking.  Though, if you
> keep reading, you'll notice that I did do a couple "stunts" in college.
> 
> When I later told this story to some friends, they were a little
> incredulous that the CIA was involved.  As I understood it, the CIA was
> involved because it was a bomb threat and it was over state lines.
> (People magazine, who reported it, versus our high school, in a
> different state.)  Whether or not that's why, I don't know - but it was
> the CIA that showed up.  In investigating it, the CIA was just being
> methodical about it.  Our high school was mentioned in the bomb threat,
> so that's where they went.  They talked to the principal and asked her
> "Who in this school is capable of doing this?"  The principal appealed
> to the current high-school senior student in charge of the computer
> room (a new one each year, and no, after this, I wasn't picked!).  He
> gave them a list of people he thought had the ability, and my name was
> first on the list.  Case closed.
> 
> * Breaking into the college computer...
> 
> Well, it was more taking advantage of an opportunity than actually
> breaking in.  I entered college in the fall in 1988.  I quickly became
> friends with a set of students that were good programmers.  We all knew
> who the "real" programmers were and who were the "Script Kiddies" (as
> they might be called today.)  One of my friends got into college at age
> 14 on a math scholarship, and is quite bright.  I'm still friends with
> him..  Anyhow, one of these friends worked as a teachers assistant and
> computer lab monitor.  I had already told him about some of my earlier
> hacking stories, so he knew I was (at least) somewhat good at it.  One
> day, late afternoon, he called me from the computer lab.  "Chris, Mr.
> xyz left his account logged in.  Do you know what to do?"  (I won't use
> Mr. xyz's real name, but he was an employee of the school's data
> center.)  "Yeah, I'll be right there." I said.  When I got there, sure
> enough, the guy left his account logged in.  It was a VAX/VMS system
> and Mr xyz had admin privledges.  So I entered "SET DEFAULT/PRIV=ALL"
> to get all privs, then proceeded to create a new admin account called
> "kudos".  Then I logged Mr. xyz out.  It was basically for fun and to
> see how long it took the admins to find and disable the account.  We
> would usually dial in remotely to check the account, or sometimes we
> would go to a terminal (never the same one we were just using) and
> login quickly to check it.  We were very passive with it, because we
> knew that if for some reason we did get caught, it wouldn't be as bad
> as if we were actually up to "bad" things (like trying to get into
> grades, deleting things, etc.)  We had the account for a good six
> months before the crap finally hit the fan.
> 
> It was about the middle of the Spring '89 semester when the fan was
> hit.  I was in the computer lab one evening doing some programming.
> (Side note: I was warned a few times about CPU usage - I liked to write
> Cellular Automata simulators and I would run them at night, fully using
> one of the two CPU's on the system.  I had it queued to start each
> night and save/stop in the morning.. Heh..)  At the end of my
> programming that night, I logged out and went to another terminal
> across the room.  I think there was only one or two other people there
> at the time, probably around 8pm.  I logged into the "kudos" account to
> see if it was still there.  It was.  I hardly logged into it that much
> anymore.  After I logged out, someone I had never seen before came into
> the room.  He was in his 40's, heavy set, with a beard.  He walked
> right up to me.  "Are you Chris?" he asked.  "Yeah..." I said, sort of
> confused.  "Please come with me." he said.  We went to his office in
> the data center, through one of the doors I never saw used before.
> Like I said, I never saw this guy before, but it turned out he had a
> Ph.D. and was the director of the data center.  He proceeded to tell me
> that he had detected the account when it was created but wanted to find
> the culprit(s).  He wrote software to log and analyze all the
> logins/locations and correlate them to other student logins and
> locations.  Eventually, he narrowed the list of names down to me.  As I
> think about it, there wasn't a lot of students that dialed in to access
> the system, but I was one of them, and the kudos account was accessed
> that way too.  That probably narrowed down the list quite a bit.  Then
> he probably noticed that the kudos account was usually accessed shortly
> after my account logged out.  Anyhow, he had me.
> 
> "Do you know the seriousness of this offence?" he asked me.  No, I
> didn't really know.. "You can be expelled from the school." he said.
> Then I was surprised at his next line of questioning.  "Who helped you
> do this?" and "How did you get in?".  Turned out that he did not
> beleive, initially, that I was even capable of doing what was done.
> That annoyed me a little, so I started telling him things like "It's
> easy.  I used to do it all the time in high school." then I told him
> the story and the commands I used to do it.  He had a hard time
> beleiving me, but I told him that we had a PDP-11 in our high school
> and it's all right there in the manuals.  I think he was looking for a
> deeper conspiracy than it was.  Anyhow, whenever I get caught, I tend
> to come clean with "the authorities" and not lie or be deceptive.  They
> usually appreciate that and tend to go easier on you than if you try
> and lie and/or misdirect them.  So me and my friend were caught.  What
> next?
> 
> Luck was on our side (or my friends, really.)  My friend was well liked
> by the faculty and they saw me as a promising student getting A's in
> all math and computer classes.  If they expelled me, they would have to
> expel my friend too.  One math teacher in particular stood up for us
> and saved our asses.  In the end, we were not expelled.  We had to do
> "community service" in the form of going to all the computer and math
> classes and give a lecture on the importance of keeping your password
> secret, not letting other people use your account(s), and ALWAYS ALWAYS
> log off the system when you're done.  Ya, we were lucky.  We basically
> got a slap on the wrist.  Our saving grace was that we were completely
> passive with the acocunt.  We didn't try deleting things, getting into
> other students directories, or trying to get into grades, etc.  If we
> had, we probably would have been kicked out of college.
> 
> * The last hack ...
> 
> My last hack was in college.  At that time, I was using a 386/20 PC and
> my dad used the Apple //e back at home for word processing.  I wrote a
> new war dialer in Turbo C and started scanning all the phone numbers in
> our college town.  There were a few systems that I got into, but
> nothing exciting.  Except for one.  I found a VAX/VMS system with the
> default accounts (Field/Service) open.  I got in.  Turned out it was
> the local cable company.  I played around with it for a few days,
> exploring the system.  At the time, I was living in a house off campus
> with 5 other guys, on the third floor of a big house.  It was actually
> 6 seperate rooms with a common hallway and bathroom.  Most of us ate on
> campus.  Sometimes we played cards ("set back") into the wee hours of
> the morning.  Most of us, too, were into computers and programming.
> One guy found out about the cable company login I had.  He asked if he
> could play around with it.  He seemed like a half decent guy and I gave
> him the phone number and login.  As it turned out he was not the
> passive type.  This guy went into their system and started deleting
> everything in sight.  It didn't bring the system down, but it did cause
> some problems.  After he did it, he banged on my door to wake me up,
> and told me what happened and that he was disconnected.  When he tried
> calling back, someone was picking up the phone.  So he decided to go
> down a couple streets and call the number from a payphone.  He called
> and some guy answered, but didn't say anything.  He could hear
> breathing, though.  So he let the payphone receiver dangle and walked
> away, saying he hoped that if any traces were done, it would lead to
> there and not his own phone line.  I recall the cable company
> advertising some sort of Wrestling special to be broadcast about a week
> from then.  That wresting special was postponed, and I am pretty sure
> it was because of what he did.  As a side note, I also remember finding
> a program on the system that would let you enter text to be
> displayed/scrolled at the bottom of the TV screen for any particular
> channel.  But it was password protected itself, and I couldn't figure a
> way into it.  Probably for the best, because that would be VERY
> tempting to use.
> 
> 
> Well, that's what I remember.. 
> // CHRIS
> 
It is a good thing that you stopped.  The telephone companies and others 
had no sense of humor when it came to hackers and the such.  I remember 
a case that happened in Santa Monica in the early 80's, we got the guy 
while his was still on line and send the police and followed  by the 
FBI, the guy spent 6 months in jail waiting to go to trial, the federal 
Judge would not lower his bail, when it was all done, he got off with 
the 6 months and a $20,000 fine and was not allowed to use computers or 
telephones for 5 years, that was a light one, others such as the one who 
got into Pacific Telephones system; can't remember his name, got 5 years.

-- 
The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? 
(c) 2006  I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co.

Lyrical Nanoha wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Chris Morse wrote:
> 
>> * TELENET
>>
>> I don't know if they are still around these days, but Telenet was/is a
>> packet-switching network owned by GTE.
> 
> I doubt it, and GTE itself is gone too (they got eaten up by Bell 
> Atlantic and thus became Verizon, which coincidentally is my current ISP).
> 
> -uso.
There is a little more to that merger, GTE was the bigger company.  I 
retired just before the merger and still do contract work on their 
network when I feel like it. A lot of their upper management are former 
GTE, they were going to close the corporate HQ in Texas, but instead 
have made it larger and a lot of the functions for the company were 
moved there.  A lot of the government communications operations were 
moved there as well as Thousand Oaks.  Not the same company.

-- 
The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? 
(c) 2006  I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co.

Chris Morse wrote:
>  ... It all started when I got a used Hayes MicroModem II ...
>

Went out to mow the lawn, and remembered another one..

* STFU!

There was a guy who ran a BBS in the next town over.  He was a real
thorn in everyone's side.  He had a superiority complex and constantly
posted flames.  He had nothing to contrubute.  Me and a friend started
thinking about ways to get him to STFU.  Yeah, we would call up and
crash his BBS now and then, but he would get it back online.  So we got
an idea.  it wasn't hard to figure out who he was.  We got his real
name, his dad's name, and their "main" phone number to the house.  Then
we called up the operator and said "This is Mr. so-and-so, I'd like to
have my second line disconnected."  We had no idea if it would work,
but the operator took the information and said it would be disconnected
in a couple days.  It was.  We taunted the guy a little on the BBS's
and he was real quiet after that.

Steven Lichter :

Fully quotes 387 lines, to add only 9 more, and sends it to many 
thousands of mailboxes.

And then continues:

"The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? 
(c) 2006  I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co."



You really ought to think about some things a bit more...

Yeah, those were phreakin' good days when the dumpster was your friend.
 To be young and mischevious again......  :-)

Do I have a real winner for you:
There was a guy who ran a pretty lame ruggie board, but fun to mess
with (time well spent while the wardialer was trying to get into the
good systems on line #2).  I got the idiot to think he could fry my
modem by splicing a phone cable and plugging it into the AC.  Word was
that he cooked his line all the way to the CO.  He might have gotten
his system too, but I never heard, and to what extent, I dunno.  His
BBS never came back online again though.

- Paul

PZ wrote:
> Yeah, those were phreakin' good days when the dumpster was your friend.
>  To be young and mischevious again......  :-)
> 
> Do I have a real winner for you:
> There was a guy who ran a pretty lame ruggie board, but fun to mess
> with (time well spent while the wardialer was trying to get into the
> good systems on line #2).  I got the idiot to think he could fry my
> modem by splicing a phone cable and plugging it into the AC.  Word was
> that he cooked his line all the way to the CO.  He might have gotten
> his system too, but I never heard, and to what extent, I dunno.  His
> BBS never came back online again though.
> 
> - Paul
> 
I don't think it got back to the CO, if it did the coils on the frame 
would have blown and stopped it.  Also some years ago each line had 
carbon coils at the box to each line at the home or business to protect 
the line from power surges or lightning

-- 
The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? 
(c) 2006  I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co.

In article <1157399875.494182.284920@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>,
 "Chris Morse" <win32mfc@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> * Crashing BBS's
>
> There were only a couple times where I had the impulse to crash a BBS.
[...]

I operated a GBBS board for several years on behalf of a local Apple 
computer club. I wrote a segment that made the BBS appear to have 
crashed into Applesoft. It gave joke answers to commands in a manner 
similar to Bruce Tognazzini's Super Hi-res Chess program (ca. 1978). It 
amused the folks who frequented the board no end. Those who used the 
clues to figure out the correct exit command could get a copy of the 
source.

This proved surprisingly effective at minimizing malicious calls. I 
think they felt as if they'd "beaten" the system, and so they moved on. 
Some even joined the club. In contrast, local operators with the most 
draconian policies seemed to attract the most vengeful vandals.

>* Breaking into the college computer...
>
>Well, it was more taking advantage of an opportunity than actually
>breaking in.

In a Fortran class, we were given canned JCL headers on punched cards 
that limited the runtime level and CPU allocation to values appropriate 
to our tyro skills. While that was useful for debugging, I needed 
something more for molecular orbital calculations. Fortunately, the 
(enormous) JCL reference manual was chained to a counter in the computer 
center. I don't think tweaking JCL was evil, but I do recall having to 
resist the lure of greed:-)

-- 
John Matthews
jmatthews at wright dot edu
www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/

John B. Matthews wrote:

> In a Fortran class, we were given canned JCL headers on punched cards 
> that limited the runtime level and CPU allocation to values appropriate 
> to our tyro skills. While that was useful for debugging, I needed 
> something more for molecular orbital calculations. Fortunately, the 
> (enormous) JCL reference manual was chained to a counter in the computer 
> center. I don't think tweaking JCL was evil, but I do recall having to 
> resist the lure of greed:-)

Whilst I can't claim any credit, a classmate of mine saw nothing wrong
with giving himself and a few of us a bit more CPU time.

It was 1st year, and we had to run some statistical package on a
honeywell timesharing system. The way our JCL was setup, it would take
about 8 hours for our jobs to run. The aforementioned classmate grabbed
the JCL manual and after changing a few characters we had our jobs
running almost immediately. So in 30 mins we had our assignments done -
whilst everyone else in our year spent a few days of twice-daily visits
to the lab to check on their jobs and make a few changes.

A few years later we were remotely connecting to computers in the
computer lab which had been "shut down" for the day - to make things
fair for all - whilst lecturers and tutors interactively marked the
major group assignments.

Not exactly capital offenses I know...

Regards,

-- 
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, <http://www.vl.com.au>
21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216
Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266

Steven Lichter wrote:
> I don't think it got back to the CO, if it did the coils on the frame
> would have blown and stopped it.  Also some years ago each line had
> carbon coils at the box to each line at the home or business to protect
> the line from power surges or lightning

It may not have, that was just the rumor after the incident (probably
according to a user who knew a friend who knew the sysop...etc).  The
line was certainly out of order immediately after the carrier dropped
and the BBS ceased to exist (either due to dead equipment, dead line,
or a combination of the two).  Anyhow, I had my phun, gloated for a
couple days and found other trouble to get myself into.  muahahaha!

- Paul

> This proved surprisingly effective at minimizing malicious calls. I
> think they felt as if they'd "beaten" the system, and so they moved on.
> Some even joined the club. In contrast, local operators with the most
> draconian policies seemed to attract the most vengeful vandals.

A lot of "daconian" (I like the usage) systems used voice validation to
verify new account info to prevent abuse and other problems.  On the
upside, I did get the oportunity to get into some pretty cool
conversations with some new users while doing validation rounds.

- Paul

ROTFL

Fether-Bait. Yeah, I remember that.

I have a bunch of papers from him here, still.

There was a very local Vic-20 user who used to call my BBS and hassle
me and other users about how his Commodore kicked everyones butt. Not
nearly as bad as John Fether. But close. I remember hooking up 110V to
the phone line, and this was before we had ESS. I had a DPDT switch
wired up so that I could, when this guy called, flip it fast.
Disconnect my modem and connect the voltage instead.

He did come back on the BBS's about a month later and say how his modem
suddenly died. I dind't know any better. I had read about it on one of
those text files.. :) My BBS phone line needed a little help after that
too. Called Pacific Bell after I got rid of the evidence.

You know, the Christmas Modermers.. and Christmas Computer getters...

you know when someone got a new computer you seemed to always be handed
a box of disks, "give me some stuff"... and this was no exception.
Pesty little twerp demanded everything.

I have a policy.. bug me, wait 24 hours. Bug me again, 24 hour gets
tacked on to the 'clock'.

dude bugged me about 10 times in the next half a day after the disks
were presented with the 'demand'.

When I finally complied, the average person would have already learned
BASIC and written about 20 things. The games he got.. ooooh boy.

Castle Wofenstien, he walked with a limp. the screaming was hacked up
so it sounded like it was saying "F***K!" .. some of the characters
were upside down.



.... and then there was this mean and nasty art teacher at school.

Locked him out, did we.

Crazy glued the doors shut. oh that was to die for, the looks. But that
was not all. This guy used to get to school some 2 hours before class
sometimes. The parking lot was a whole campus and hillside away, out of
view and dark. 1983, too cheap to have lights on all night. When he
went to the classroom to get in, and couldn't they told me they had
come early to school to play candid camera and see his reactions. What
I found out later that was in addition to the locks and windows on the
classroom, while he was trying to get into the class someone else went
and locked up the car so that when he went back to the car, his key got
stuck in the car door. no keyfobs, no alarms. Old fashioned put the key
in and turn it.

A friend decided he needed a Monitor /// and there was a spare, sorta,
in the computer lab at school.   He offered to empty the trash one day.
The Monitor /// was in the trashbag along with the trash.

Now the funny thing here was the relationship we all had with the lady
that ran the lab at the time.

She marched into our 1st period class the next morning, it was sooo
funny. She walked right up to him and in front of the whole class, "You
stole that monitor, didn't you!" - the teacher was stunned, everyone
knew us who hung out in the computer lab at lunch.. She grabbed his ear
and hauled him out of class. The monitor came back within an hour.
Nothing really happened over it. But pretty much everyone knew. :)

Lastly, the Flaming Disk Drive. Pulverize a bunch of match heads and
make powder. Then mix in some water and make paste. Spread a fine layer
of match paste on a floppy disk and replace the innars with   a litte
bit of fine grit sand paper.

Label it Ultima IV and hid it in the computer lab. Where they had a
strict no games policy, people used to break the keyboards with Olympic
Decathlon.

It didn't burn down anything, but it sure stunk and someone got busted
for playing games because it attracted attention.

PZ wrote:
>> This proved surprisingly effective at minimizing malicious calls. I
>> think they felt as if they'd "beaten" the system, and so they moved on.
>> Some even joined the club. In contrast, local operators with the most
>> draconian policies seemed to attract the most vengeful vandals.
> 
> A lot of "daconian" (I like the usage) systems used voice validation to
> verify new account info to prevent abuse and other problems.  On the
> upside, I did get the oportunity to get into some pretty cool
> conversations with some new users while doing validation rounds.
> 
> - Paul
> 
I When my BBS was up, I voice validated some, but I had a dial back 
system which would call the new user back and they would have to put 
their user information in, they would then have full access.  At least 
that way I had a number that they could be reached by or if I had 
problems with them something to go back on.

-- 
The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? 
(c) 2006  I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co.

Steven Lichter wrote:
> Lyrical Nanoha wrote:
> > On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Chris Morse wrote:
> >
> >> * TELENET
> >>
> >> I don't know if they are still around these days, but Telenet was/is a
> >> packet-switching network owned by GTE.
> >
> > I doubt it, and GTE itself is gone too (they got eaten up by Bell
> > Atlantic and thus became Verizon, which coincidentally is my current ISP).
> >
> > -uso.
> There is a little more to that merger, GTE was the bigger company.  I
> retired just before the merger and still do contract work on their
> network when I feel like it. A lot of their upper management are former
> GTE, they were going to close the corporate HQ in Texas, but instead
> have made it larger and a lot of the functions for the company were
> moved there.  A lot of the government communications operations were
> moved there as well as Thousand Oaks.  Not the same company.
>
>
GTE Wireless may have been bigger, but Bell Atlantic ate them for
lunch. Many middle-managers disappeared, and eventually, Bell
Atlantic's systems replaced GTE's, and my employer, EDS, finally lost
the account.

I was there, under the tents at the new campus in Alpharetta, GA, when
they announced their new name. And I knew it wasn't to be the same
company.

That was the high point of my career, working on the Point of Sale team
for GTE Wireless, later doing system support for the CMIS Billing
system as well...

I remember there was an older gentleman who liked to eat his lunch on
the wooden crosswalk between two of the buildings. Story goes when the
new CEO or president of the company visited and saw this, he told one
of his flunkies that he wanted him gone by the end of the day. So, they
fired him, later on finding out he was the only person who knew a
particular system/application. I suppose just a rumor. But I do
remember the day he visited, and I never saw the old fellow again.

My career ended there when Verizon finally pulled the plug on our POS
application. This is when I found out that my position was fully-funded
by them up to that point, and EDS didn't want to assume the
responsibility...

anoneds@netscape.net wrote:
> Steven Lichter wrote:
>> Lyrical Nanoha wrote:
>>> On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Chris Morse wrote:
>>>
>>>> * TELENET
>>>>
>>>> I don't know if they are still around these days, but Telenet was/is a
>>>> packet-switching network owned by GTE.
>>> I doubt it, and GTE itself is gone too (they got eaten up by Bell
>>> Atlantic and thus became Verizon, which coincidentally is my current ISP).
>>>
>>> -uso.
>> There is a little more to that merger, GTE was the bigger company.  I
>> retired just before the merger and still do contract work on their
>> network when I feel like it. A lot of their upper management are former
>> GTE, they were going to close the corporate HQ in Texas, but instead
>> have made it larger and a lot of the functions for the company were
>> moved there.  A lot of the government communications operations were
>> moved there as well as Thousand Oaks.  Not the same company.
>>
>>
> GTE Wireless may have been bigger, but Bell Atlantic ate them for
> lunch. Many middle-managers disappeared, and eventually, Bell
> Atlantic's systems replaced GTE's, and my employer, EDS, finally lost
> the account.
> 
> I was there, under the tents at the new campus in Alpharetta, GA, when
> they announced their new name. And I knew it wasn't to be the same
> company.
> 
> That was the high point of my career, working on the Point of Sale team
> for GTE Wireless, later doing system support for the CMIS Billing
> system as well...
> 
> I remember there was an older gentleman who liked to eat his lunch on
> the wooden crosswalk between two of the buildings. Story goes when the
> new CEO or president of the company visited and saw this, he told one
> of his flunkies that he wanted him gone by the end of the day. So, they
> fired him, later on finding out he was the only person who knew a
> particular system/application. I suppose just a rumor. But I do
> remember the day he visited, and I never saw the old fellow again.
> 
> My career ended there when Verizon finally pulled the plug on our POS
> application. This is when I found out that my position was fully-funded
> by them up to that point, and EDS didn't want to assume the
> responsibility...
> 
GTE Wireless was owned by GTE, but now it is called Verizon Wireless, 
and it a different company, it was made up of GTE Wireless, Bell 
Atlantic mobile and AirTouch and Vodifon, it is a different company 
owned by each.  We are getting way off the subject  of this newsgroup.



-- 
The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? 
(c) 2006  I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co.

Terry Olsen wrote:
> The hacker handle thread is pretty interesting. But what evil things has
> anyone done? I can tell you about a couple of mine...

Apple nerdiness:
In elementary school, we had several computer games they wanted us to
play.  I had a good 2-3 year head-start on Apple basic and knew what
ctrl-c would do to anything that dared to show the ] prompt during
boot.  So I would modify some of the game disks to increase your odds
of shooting bison (oregon trail) or make every day sunny (lemonaid
stand).

But my favorite trick was to replace the HELLO program with one that
printed out a normal basic prompt and pretended to act normal (easy way
-> for x=1 to 5:print "]";: input a$: next x) and after a few lines of
input start printing "?SYNTAX ERROR" a few times and then move on to
newer, funnier error messages of a more insulting nature, finally
exiting with the final command "NEW" -- on top of all that I modified
the program listing so that you couldn't see what the program really
was.

Of course, this sort of thing went on for years in some way or another.
 My computer lab teachers kept an eye on me.  There was a certain
middle school teacher I had tormented who did not realize that my
little sister was related to me.  I was in high school and long gone --
he thought he was safe and rid of me.  So I scanned a pic of me and
snuck it onto her disk so that it would pop up while he was grading her
simple-looking program (I also taught her many tricks, which she used
to just get A's without paying much attention in class, though she
really did not need my help).  Aparently, it really surprised him.  And
left him very scared of my little sister for some reason >:-D

Phunny Phreaking:
It just so turns out that the local phone exchange where you could
replace all 498 numbers with 234 and the regular last 4 digits.  So,
for example, pick up the handset on a phone with the number 498-1111
and dial 234-1111.  An odd tone played after that, which meant it
worked.  Flash the hook and then hang up.  The phone exchange would
call back immediately.  Hang up after that and it would stop, but if
you instead flash the hook and hang up and it would call again, etc.

So there was this pay phone in the courtyard of my middle school...
And a lot of friends had numbers that started with 498...  And some
local businesses...  And the neighborhood pool...  Oh man I had so much
fun with that one!!! >:-D

Anti-coprorate activity:
Hmm... let's see... there was another time I got sick and tired of a
certain evil chain store (lousy service, crappy prices, I was a bored
teenager with a car, etc), so I swapped the guts of a brand new 28.8
external zoom modem with the 9600 baud zoom modem I already owned.  The
case and boards were nearly identical.  And so I returned the modem
saying it was not connecting at fast speeds.  Wow.  That was totally
evil.  Not as evil as other folks I knew who were getting free ram
upgrades in a similar way, but still pretty evil.

Hmmmm.....I probably did the typical evilness.

Lets see.....

Spent much time gaining long distance codes, then calling a conference
line in Maryland and setting up a group (Unicom Nexus) chat til the
wee hours in the morning.  That was always fun to do.....


Got an Applecat modem and wrote myself a wardialer.  Parents gave me
my own phone line.....had to put it to good use, right?

Lets see....my local BBS back the the old 818 was Port Royal.  There
were always the typical trouble makers...which we appropriately
"handled" at either one of the many pizza/copying parties.

Of course there were the typical C64 vs. Apple ][ fights...escpecially
this one guy....He was the focus of much teepeeing and sprinler system
modification.

Lets see....in the early 90s, there was a guy who ran a BBS who would
basically harass pretty much everybody on it.  So we gave him a lovely
virus with the guise that it was this military grade virus scanning
software.   Really seems lame nowadays that it even worked.



If I think about things more Im sure I could come up with a whole slew
of evil doings...


-Chris Ryan

a2aviator@gmail.com wrote:
> Lastly, the Flaming Disk Drive. Pulverize a bunch of match heads and
> make powder. Then mix in some water and make paste. Spread a fine layer
> of match paste on a floppy disk and replace the innars with   a litte
> bit of fine grit sand paper.
>
> Label it Ultima IV and hid it in the computer lab. Where they had a
> strict no games policy, people used to break the keyboards with Olympic
> Decathlon.
>
> It didn't burn down anything, but it sure stunk and someone got busted
> for playing games because it attracted attention.

That's hillarious!  I read that text file on a BBS -- something about
"watch the disk boot the user" -- but I didn't know it would actually
work.  Wow.  ROTFL

-B

> * Crashing BBS's
>
> There were only a couple times where I had the impulse to crash a BBS.

There was one time I had the impulse to crash a BBS and I did. It was called 
Mike & Matts Tavern, later called just The Tavern. It was a GBBS system. 
Mike had made it a refuge for Jon Fether, where he launched his flame wars. 
"FutureNet Sucks, TeamNet Rules, BoycoT Sucks, Xenon Knight (Knight with a 
moon) sucks", you get the picture.

During all this, my account was deleted from The Tavern. I dialed in one day 
and couldn't log in. So I tried to log in using Fether's account (and his 
password that he used on my BBS). I got in and found that he had Sysop 
access.

I went back to Merlin and whipped up an ACOS external that wrote zero's to 
every device starting in slot 7, drive 2 and working down from there. Tried 
it out with a few floppies and it worked nicely on my computer.  I then 
logged back in to The Tavern and replaced the Blackspring Full-Screen editor 
external with this little gem and logged out.  The BBS would keep running 
fine as long as nobody tried to use the Full-Screen editor.

The next day, I tried to call The Tavern and it just rang & rang.  I don't 
remember if he ever came back online after that, but some time after that 
Mike announced on another local BBS that he was quitting the BBS business.

This was done in total blackout. I never told even my closest allies that I 
had done it. 

Terry Olsen wrote:
>> * Crashing BBS's
>>
>> There were only a couple times where I had the impulse to crash a BBS.
> 
> There was one time I had the impulse to crash a BBS and I did. It was called 
> Mike & Matts Tavern, later called just The Tavern. It was a GBBS system. 
> Mike had made it a refuge for Jon Fether, where he launched his flame wars. 
> "FutureNet Sucks, TeamNet Rules, BoycoT Sucks, Xenon Knight (Knight with a 
> moon) sucks", you get the picture.
> 
> During all this, my account was deleted from The Tavern. I dialed in one day 
> and couldn't log in. So I tried to log in using Fether's account (and his 
> password that he used on my BBS). I got in and found that he had Sysop 
> access.
> 
> I went back to Merlin and whipped up an ACOS external that wrote zero's to 
> every device starting in slot 7, drive 2 and working down from there. Tried 
> it out with a few floppies and it worked nicely on my computer.  I then 
> logged back in to The Tavern and replaced the Blackspring Full-Screen editor 
> external with this little gem and logged out.  The BBS would keep running 
> fine as long as nobody tried to use the Full-Screen editor.
> 
> The next day, I tried to call The Tavern and it just rang & rang.  I don't 
> remember if he ever came back online after that, but some time after that 
> Mike announced on another local BBS that he was quitting the BBS business.
> 
> This was done in total blackout. I never told even my closest allies that I 
> had done it. 
> 
> 
As the FBI kicks in your door!!!

-- 
The Only Good Spammer is a Dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? 
(c) 2006  I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot In Hell Co.

Terry Olsen wrote:
> > * Crashing BBS's
> >
> > There were only a couple times where I had the impulse to crash a BBS.
>
> I went back to Merlin and whipped up an ACOS external that wrote zero's to
> every device starting in slot 7, drive 2 and working down from there.

Hah.. Yeah, that is quite evil.  Especially so if the person had a HD
installed! Probably not, but, still, the BBS was wiped out.

I ran a BBS for a little while.  Called something like "Rebel's
Hideout".  I don't recall much, but I do remember that after I took it
down, I would still get calls. I recall distinctly, on many occasions,
answering the phone and saying "Hello?" When no one answered, I would
flip on the Apple //, hit Ctrl-Reset, PR#2, ATH1, ATA, and get the
modem to connect.  Then I would type "Hello?" and usually get into a
conversation.  Funny.  Couldn't cold boot a computer like that today!
Well, not unless it was an Apple //! hehe

// CHRIS

On Sun, 3 Sep 2006 22:18:35 -0600, "Terry Olsen" <tolsen64@hotmail.com> wrote:

>The hacker handle thread is pretty interesting. But what evil things has 
>anyone done? I can tell you about a couple of mine...

Myself and another friend who was a CoCo/TRS-80 nut used to cruise the
Radioshack stores around the central Ohio area and run the poke to put 
the demo CoCo (or was it CoCo-2) unit into Turbo mode (the high speed
Poke), then left it with the off chance it would overheat. Lame but a
fun distraction.

The other fun was going to the back of K-Mart and setting the C64s to
print stupid statements in a simple GOTO loop, and leave them running.
You know, things like "kiss my ass", etc...

Ah, to be a bored teenager up to no good... when the simplest act of
anarchy didn't result in threats of terrorism charges.

Bryan