I was just given a computer from a former hacker

[phreaqe]

I had to look that up.

Don't know what your point is though.

Didnt really have a point, your post just made me think of the movie that the quote references and thought most people here would get the reference.

 

[dwell]

around what year? Most just talked the talk back then though.

Must have been '91. Guy was a bigger mouth than most. Macho latino type always talking shit. Would love to remember his name.

 

[alkemyst]

Agreed.

I'm a lurker, don't tend to post much, but yes Alkemyst, its a good post.

Most of the time I disregard/skip whatever you (Alkemyst) have to say. But in this instance, I'm actually intrigued. It doesn't mean much, but it'd be awesome (to me) if you'd share about that era, what you thought about it, and what you and your brother or friends did at the time. (Non-incriminating, of course. :::smileyface;;; ) That little corner of the internet of what you guys did seems like the foundation of what the future is going to be like security-wise.

:thumbsup brah, and thanks for sharing.

Crabs

Well...back around 1990 our next door neighbor used to come home throw down drunk....it wouldn't be so bad if if didn't affect us.

Several times he parked too close for one of us to get into our cars, sometimes he just parked behind us (he drove a big work truck).

One day my brother and I are leaving for school and see his truck over my brothers car.

We knock on his door and his wife answers, see the mess and goes up furiously at him.

He comes down and insists my brother slid sideways and ended up under him. We call the police. No DUI given but he is cited. He never pays.

Fast forward to one night with a scanner and we pick him up calling about how he is being underpaid to a chick that gave him some salaries.

Bonus him calling information and getting each one of their numbers and names.

We then looked up in the phone book and got addresses and spouse's names.

After he called each to complain why do they think they are worth more than he is and a bunch of threatening talk. I called each back as 'corporate security'. When they each called the tool back thinking it was a scam, I called them back with each of their conversations.

We told each to avoid 'Mark', that Mark shouldn't be talked too or acknowledged. If WE see you talking to him, EVEN TO TELL HIM YOU SHOULDN'T BE TALKING TO HIM...we will know.

Anyway, in a couple days on a holiday weekend Mark had some Spy company drilling holes in his walls all day looking for bugs.

In the end they told him it was an intercepted cordless call or someone put on a lineman's set to his NID.

He finally gave up and came back with a check to repair my brother's car plus the extra money we wanted for the hassle.

 

[alkemyst]

wow...seriously?

 

[thepd7]

Well...back around 1990 our next door neighbor used to come home throw down drunk....it wouldn't be so bad if if didn't affect us.

Several times he parked too close for one of us to get into our cars, sometimes he just parked behind us (he drove a big work truck).

One day my brother and I are leaving for school and see his truck over my brothers car.

We knock on his door and his wife answers, see the mess and goes up furiously at him.

He comes down and insists my brother slid sideways and ended up under him. We call the police. No DUI given but he is cited. He never pays.

Fast forward to one night with a scanner and we pick him up calling about how he is being underpaid to a chick that gave him some salaries.

Bonus him calling information and getting each one of their numbers and names.

We then looked up in the phone book and got addresses and spouse's names.

After he called each to complain why do they think they are worth more than he is and a bunch of threatening talk. I called each back as 'corporate security'. When they each called the tool back thinking it was a scam, I called them back with each of their conversations.

We told each to avoid 'Mark', that Mark shouldn't be talked too or acknowledged. If WE see you talking to him, EVEN TO TELL HIM YOU SHOULDN'T BE TALKING TO HIM...we will know.

Anyway, in a couple days on a holiday weekend Mark had some Spy company drilling holes in his walls all day looking for bugs.

In the end they told him it was an intercepted cordless call or someone put on a lineman's set to his NID.

He finally gave up and came back with a check to repair my brother's car plus the extra money we wanted for the hassle.

what's with you, two highly entertaining stories in one thread?

 

[fixxor]

I want more. This stuff is very interesting...

 

[Narmer]

Small world.

 

[PhaZe]

Threads like these are the reason I stick around Interesting stuff!

 

[Lithium381]

yeah, normally alkimists threads are lame, but this one delivers1

 

[alkemyst]

what's with you, two highly entertaining stories in one thread?

The funniest parts things you really had to be there to experience. Like the sound of some guy drilling holes in the walls all morning and my dad wondering WTF is going on next door.

I wish I remembered the line by line chats we had with his co-workers and some of the things they said about him. For a week or so I'd follow up with some and make mention of witnessing them talking to Mark. They'd usually say it was work-related.

I'd tell them they don't understand the severity of our demands. I told them even if he came into their office, they are to leave the room. Seek shelther in HR if they must.

I mentioned HR is prepared to deal with Mark at the highest level and would they be on-board with the company's story should that need to happen.

It would be like "Look, I don't really like Mark, but I really don't want to know anything more about this...I will do want you want.:



There was other things we picked up just on scanning and being in a small townhouse community at the time it wasn't too hard to figure out who was who.

One lady was having an affair and they'd get pretty detailed on the phone. I couldn't figure it out until I heard "OHHH POOKIE YOU MADE A MESS"....Pookie was her cat and she'd walk him on a leash.

My brother and I put together a newsletter each month called Mad Times and left them by the community pool. We anonymized the names, but the full stories (bugs in the wall, affairs, someone's kid getting arrested or medical embarrassments).

It was some funny stuff.

When I was at University of Florida and doing cell phone scanning I was listening to someone's conversation right when they ran down a homeless guy. They eventually called the police, but they hashed out what to do with whomever they were talking to. Things like any witnesses? no. What's your car look like? Pretty bad man.

 

[Narse]

Wow and I thought it was cool to find the number of a test line I could use to break in on peoples phone calls and kick them off the line if they were on back in the early 90's.

Please share some more! Great stories alkemyst.

 

[ViviTheMage]

I can't follow anything of what alkemyst is saying ... I think I am too young, LOL.

But they sound like cool events.

 

[ViRGE]

I can't follow anything of what alkemyst is saying ... I think I am too young, LOL.

But they sound like cool events.

And conversely, being able to follow and nod at what he's saying makes me realize just how old I am. By god that really was a long time ago.

Thanks for the excellent posts alkemyst; I'll put in a good word for you the next time you're up for a vacation.

 

[alkemyst]

Wow and I thought it was cool to find the number of a test line I could use to break in on peoples phone calls and kick them off the line if they were on back in the early 90's.

Please share some more! Great stories alkemyst.

Well speaking on phone stuff there was some interesting things that really weren't secure back then. I am sure it was such a small number of people exploiting it, it really didn't matter to the phone company.

The way it worked back then was you had this database. It listed what number you would dial, what number it would route to, what class of phone it was (payphone or not), billed or not, and logs or not...there was other stuff, but I forget. I can't even remember the interface really.

Most of us kept a red box at home because nothing sucked worst than picking up your phone and being told to deposit a quarter.

All the phones were tone based back then. A nickel was a sound, a quarter five of those sounds right after each other. Later on the phone's would have a sensor to at least detect if some coin was in the slot.

Some of the funniest pranks were to change some asshat's phone to a payphone or route a local pizza place's calls to their number. Sometimes changing it to billable for all local calls was a good kick in their nuts.

A couple times we changed the routing to the bridge (party line) we were all on. We'd all share responding round-robin, word by word.

 

[dwell]

Most of us kept a red box at home because nothing sucked worst than picking up your phone and being told to deposit a quarter.

I remember the old Rad Shack crystal mod red box. I was the star of my dorm with that guy.

We did a lot of nefarious stuff back then. Nothing really involving theft other than some free phone calls which I frown on today but at the time it was exciting stuff.

Before "social engineering" became a household word we were doing some funny pranks with calling in to companies through a bunch of call routing (untraceable). There was a crappy low budget telco that ran phone card scams in the early 90s. We would call their CSRs and get them to do stuff like reset their terminals, stand up and say stupid things aloud, and once evacuate the building. Sounds terrible in retrospect but at the time we thought we were gods. Someone out there has the recordings of those pranks.

There was a S&M phone line in NYC called "The Dungeon" that we would call in from alliances and get the pervs who call in to do stuff over the phone I don't even want to go into. Terrible stuff now that I think back.

Then there was the actual hacking. So many Unix systems were up with default/no root passwords. My first exposure to the Internet was dialing into a local science lab and getting on Telenet (yes Telenet, not telnet). I was like, "what's .com? Are those executables? How do I run them? "

Where it got thorny was the AT&T System 75 systems you would run into. They ran the local PBXs and you always find them when war dialing. They all had default accounts passwords and let's say hacking those to get free phones calls tends to attract the attention of the authorities

It was a different world than it is today with the Internet, script kiddies, WiFi, cell phones, etc.

 

[ravana]

Thanks for a highly entertaining year ending thread :thumbsup:

Please accept my humble & honest Cool Story Bro.

 

[dwell]

One more funny story. In 1993 Billy Idol released and album called Cyberpunk where he made it seem like he was some kind of elite hacker. All the real hackers had it in for him for exploiting the culture. He had an email address "idol@mindvox.com" printed on the back of the album (that was a big deal at the time) which happened to be my ISP. One day I dialed in to mindvox. Normally you were greeted with:

mindvox:~$

This time I was greeted with simply:

#

The su must of dropped term and I grabbed his connection. I might have done something like:

cat /etc/passwd | grep idol

This was before shadow password files were common. I didn't want to do anything further as I had a few prior scares but I shared the hash with some people with less morals than myself who cracked his account and logged in as him.

Turns out the big "cyberpunk" never logged in and never even checked his email. Poser

 

[allthatisman]

Wow, this is very interesting stuff. I always knew there were people like some of you that lurked on this site... I keep thinking about Matthew Broderick in WarGames, lol. I saw that movie in the early 90s when I discovered BBS's. I am often curious about people that have the will and the ability to "hack" and what compels them to go looking into large, sometimes classified systems for no other reason other than curiosity. I know a lot of it is more fiction than anything, but it still makes me wonder.

 

[alkemyst]

One more funny story. In 1993 Billy Idol released and album called Cyberpunk where he made it seem like he was some kind of elite hacker. All the real hackers had it in for him for exploiting the culture. He had an email address "idol@mindvox.com" printed on the back of the album (that was a big deal at the time) which happened to be my ISP. One day I dialed in to mindvox. Normally you were greeted with:

mindvox:~$

This time I was greeted with simply:

#

The su must of dropped term and I grabbed his connection. I might have done something like:

cat /etc/passwd | grep idol

This was before shadow password files were common. I didn't want to do anything further as I had a few prior scares but I shared the hash with some people with less morals than myself who cracked his account and logged in as him.

Turns out the big "cyberpunk" never logged in and never even checked his email. Poser

mindvox: http://www.docdroppers.org/wiki/index.php?title=Patrick_K._Kroupa