I have somehow found myself doing a lighthearted talk on retro hacking this Wednesday. Would anyone here happen to know anything about it?
80s was all about the phones. And not much different than it is now.
If you want to know what hacking is like in the 80s watch Wargames and look up three dudes:
- Kevin Mitnick
- Mark Hess
- Katl Koch
If you want to know what hacking was like in the 90s watch Sneakers and look up
- Vladimir Levin
- Robert Tappan Morris
I dunno, having payphones on every other street corner in the 80’s-90’s can seem like a foreign concept today.
My dad and his buddy devised a plan to get unlimited calls from phone booths to abroad. They drilled a 2 Deutschmark coin and put a fishing line through it. They figured out that the coin only drops after the allotted time is up, allowing the machine for there to be credit registered. But there was nothing preventing the coin from going upwards again. So they just kept pulling it out and then inserting the coin again. And re-dialing the international number. Like some petty comic book villains.
That would be because the notion of having a pay phone on every corner is.
That is beside the point. The phone is just a pathway, the hacking is the same. The phone gets the hacker to the end user. Today the cellphon/tablet/pc is just a pathway to the end user.
When it comes to tech as much as everyone thinks it changes the more it stays the same.
My ISP would give you like 10 MB to build a personal website. You’d log in to the FTP server, and it would take you to your personal directory. From there, you could “cd …” and end up in the parent directory and access everybody’s data.
I wonder what the equivalent of this is today? Not meaning the same thing but what is incredibly insecure.
Probably cell phone interception and manipulation of cell service.
People. Social engineering is orders of magnitude easier than most default security configs.
That said, dumb security mistakes still happen regularly. Remember a few years ago when Missouri had a bunch of teachers’ personal data just in the HTML sent to every person visiting their site? When a journalist notified them, the govt tried to say he was hacker.
Money going online really changed the mood.
I recall a conference talk mentioning that the speaker (from a nordic country) told their friend to look at their online banking account, and then transferred them $-10. Either they were spotted or they disclosed it, I forget which, and luckily they were hired instead of jailed.
Money going online really changed the mood.
So true. Money spoils everything.
Damn
In the 90’s, companies were super lax on data security, retention, and destruction. In my city we had major IT players like INTEL, HP, Motorola, etc. We would dumpster dive and find whole computers full of data and no passwords. We were after the hardware so all our friends could play Doom MP, Quake, or later Unreal Tournament… so we usually wiped them but who knows what was in those things. It was a lot of e-waste and because of divers with bad intentions, now there’s incredibly strict corporate rules about data security/destruction.
Different topic but ewaste today is absolutely insane. People throw out working post-2015 “gaming laptops” - maybe a dead battery or something equally simple to fix.
I cannot speak for other countries, but here in America, I blame the fact that once family and personal computers became a big thing they stopped teaching about them in schools.
I know I never had a single class or subject related to using a computer. They just expected us to know how to use them.
They just expected us to know how to use them.
And they still do. The “kids these days and their compyooturs” fallacy. Irks me to my core.
I was fortunate to have a middle school typing and graphic design class, and in highschool I learned hardware troubleshooting and stuff (A+ equivalent IT work)…but that “career path” of flipping computers that people downloaded the wrong screensaver on kinda died out.
Still learned a lot though! If the I.T field was still hanging out with buddies in some dungeon nobody visited, I might be in that field today lol.
Maybe I just don’t know where to look or what.
I always hear these stories but companies in my city tend to donate old machines to charities (cool if it works that way) or trade them in to their vendor or something.
I’m actually kinda afraid with all the tarrifs and crap that we’re gonna see secondhand hardware turn into speculative inflated eBay fodder because average folks can’t afford new anymore.
Still looking for this supposed mountain of <TPM 2.0 machines that are supposed to surface for next to nothing any minute now. 😅
Late 80s early 90s I got into the database for our menus & recipes and changed ‘hot dog’ to ‘tibe steak smothered in underwear’ and then promptly forgot about it until one day months later with the storeroom clerk he was printing the monthly menus and inventory, lol and behold I laughed my ass off. He never even noticed because we just printed and filed the paperwork.
I also point around in areas that were ‘resteicted’ I found the ‘star wars’ game, and I would play it for hours on the midnight shift. Nothing like the old green screen games.
Insert Willem Dafoe meme Im something of a hacker myself
Target sent credit card information to the back of the store unencrypted. Bluetooth didn’t need encryption because nobody can get that close. You could stop 50% of malware by changing the name of your windows directory. Security through obscurity was believed to work, every automated oil rig in the gulf was operating in the clear even into the 2000’s.
Wild times.
It was exactly like the movie Hackers. 😅
Due to the nature of how the ARPAnet was born (lots of academic influence and the view of free sharing of information) outside the DOD infosec wasnt a thing, even then it was an after thought.
There was a healthy phone hacking community coming out of the 70s and into the 80s. Their techniques for getting free calls helped with exploiting the ARPAnet
There were pretty significant technology changes in the 90s with the WWW and the number of people and companies online leading to more opportunities and ways to exploit.
Wargames and Sneakers are pretty entertaining and while movies will give you a bit of a vibe.
If you can highly recommend you read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg_(book)
Really easy read and amazing true story
It wasn’t like the military had that much better OPSEC. The code to launch American nuclear weapons for over, 15 years was 00000000.
the phreaks will, they had tons of fun
[removed my post: someone else already mentioned Captain Crunch]
Of course not speaking for experience. I’ve personally never broken the law.
But often when companies listed their contact information they’d have a phone line and a fax number. If those numbers were near each other, you could pretty much guarantee that there would be a phone number somewhere in that sequence, or just past it, that would let you dial into their network, often weakly guarded with default password on common user names.
While it could take a little while, I’m aware of people collecting company phone numbers and war dialling overnight to find the network service number. Once you spoke to a modem it would give you a telnet connection and there was hardly ever any form of rate control. The worst I’ve hear about was getting chucked off after three attempts. But you could just dial up again.
I’ve heard of many, many company secrets being found that way.
Phone phreaking was where the fun was. Free phone calls, messing with other people’s boxes and stuff. When it was purely electric phone lines were easy to manipulate.
That and before PayPal credit card processing took weeks.
You could fake a credit card so easy and just get services until they tried to bill it.
The same techniques for social engineering are still the most effective ones.
Computers and systems get smarter.
People actually get dumber.
Watch the movie Hackers, it’s basically a documentary. Roller blades, hacker dive bars, extreme fashion, custom boot screens, swirly 3D effects around you when you’re typing fast. It was rad…
Aaah, the good old times hacking into The Gibson…
Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World" by Joseph Menn
If just looking for a casual, non-technical read, this is a good one. It led me to a few rabbit holes to dive down deeper.
I recommend The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll as a good start.
Lack of knowledge was the big problem before the internet. Late 80s, early 90s.
Take Phreaking.
Dialup BBSs (1200/75, 2400 or 9600 baud) were the primary source of dodgy files that I knew of. Some would have a secret area with various texts about hacking and quasi-illegal behaviour, including pornography of all flavours and of course the anarchists’ handbook. There were a few hacking and phreaking related stuff (getting free phone calls was huge then, given the cost of online activities - blackboxing, blueboxing, etc) and often required researching the types of PBX being used until you knew more than the people employed to run the things. To get access to this you’d need to suck up to the BBS owner, or prove your worth and “I’m not a law enforcement officer, honest” credits. Vouchsafing friends and others was another way, and there was cross-checking of you by sysops talking to each other.
The security on phone systems was laughable by modern standards, but at the time it was something very strongly guarded and if you found something, you made sure it stayed private. The phone companies helped by constantly denying anything was happening, but stakes were high. Legal consequences were high, but so were the rewards if you could get free calls.
Myself, I never did, but I always wanted to. Not having my monthly phone bills of hundreds of pounds would have been really nice…
When ADSL and always-on connections became available, phreaking stopped overnight.
