Back in the good old days we were sending this to random ICQ users saying something like "hey I'm a game developer and made this game, would you like to try it?". I'm not very proud of that tbh.
Yes, now if you do that you end up with a 2000 word threat analysis write up by a network security startup that claims you’re using sophisticated social engineering.
What you could do was embedding the BO exe inside another exe disguised as a jpg picture. When executed it would extract and run BO in the background and also display a jpg. ICQ conveniently didn't display the end of long filenames, so you could send it as "xyz.jpg[20spaces].exe" and it would seem like you just shared a picture. Worked like a charm the one time I tested this technique on an unsuspecting friend during a LAN party.
I’d bet there’s more than a few people here in respectable places now that learnt to code through VB6, Delphi, python, Perl, PHP to write rats and exploit code.
it was mainly delphi7, because the executables didn't require suspicious dll dependencies. If you statically linked midaslib, msvcrt was all you needed.
Marco Arment (Overcast, Instapaper, Tumblr) on AOL proggies, most of which were built on popular VB6 libraries made for that purpose: http://articles.marco.org/44
> “ However, use of NetBus has had serious consequences. In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.”
A former "friend" of mine in high school deleted my documents including due school work with netbus or BO (don't remember which one). It really was a shitty thing to do and he was proud of it that I lost weeks of work.
I got revenge couple of months later with a "screensaver" that I've made in Delphi. In reality it would just "crash" with some random error, but actually copy itself on multiple places on the hard drive with windows sounding names, run both as a service and some innocent sounding files etc. It wouldn't show up in task manager. I could send and execute whatever commands I liked. I've deleted his Diablo saves a week later or so, and man he was livid as he wasted months playing. He had no idea what happened as he had two AV programs installed and he was confident it would detect a trojan.
Windows security at that period of time really was a contradiction in terms.
I remember this - and using the same CD opening closing joke on people in the college lab. The technicians had no idea what was going on. I don’t think they really knew anything about computers - we once found a word doc on one of the computers with every password for the entire college / website etc.
Did this to my Computer Programming teacher in high-school while he sat in the other room and we could watch him visibly confused. Probably the most vivid memory I h ave from high-school.
I remember packing jpegs with sub7 payloads and sending to my friends on AIM. The opening and closing on the CD tray is such a classic prank. Best part was that given I was usually the guy my friends and their parents called to fix their computer trouble, I was getting IMs from all of them saying “my cd tray keeps opening and closing”. The reveal of the prank was great except for when I must have done it for like 3 hours while my friend’s mom was using the family computer. She wasn’t very happy with me.
Sub7 was a lot of fun. So many options. I will add to the computer lab anecdotes. I gave this to my buddies at school who were in the same crew(we mostly made VB 'proggies' for AOL,) but of course two of them install it in the library computer lab. I told them it's not illegal to have but is to use. They mess with students even doing things like deleting essays being written. The IT people figure it out and my buddies get arrested and cut ties. They are expelled for a whole year and when they come back can't use any school computers. Did anyone ever figure out if there was a backdoor in the backdoor from the maker?
But that kind of stuff is what got me interested in computers and programming back in junior high. Learned the basics of control statements and OOP in a fun engaging way. I made an AOL chatroom mailserver with sendkeys :D and later became more advanced using APIs. These were very much like mIRC but AOL hosted all the files so even better. There were private chatrooms based on just making these things and prewritten libraries floating around. Who remembers genocide.bas?(hey I didn't name it) Anybody have these? I have copies somewhere on a zip drive.
Remember punters? In dialup days you could flood a person with chat messages containing html heading tags that would slow them down rendering to the point they could never catch up. Others eventually found exploits that could crash the app on one message.
The Trojans for AOL were also pretty good. Would capture the password field and once connected open an email in the background and send it wherever, then delete sent. Back then though you could as easily just say you are an admin and ask someone for their password. Your whole neighborhood probably openly sharing through netbeui.
I think it's long enough ago to say I ran an FTP on mirc and the password was like the 5th word on the xdrive free account confirmation page. They started at $2 a referral and I bought a nice 17" ViewSonic monitor to play Quake on in the 8th grade. Other friends bought whole computers. Shut that down when the FTP got hacked and I got a cease and desist letter for 3d studio max, thought the law was coming to break down my door. After that I mellowed out.
The most fun I had with Sub7 (or maybe it was Netbus?) was opening the CD-ROM drives of computers in the computer lab and watching people's reactions. Good times....
I used to use this tool to mess with my college computer class professor. Me and a buddy installed it on the teachers computer that she used to instruct the class. We did mostly innocent stuff like closing windows or messing with the browser a bit. Occasionally we would reboot her computer when it was close to the end of class and we didn’t want to start something new. We’re both still coders to this day.
I was 13 when it came out, and my targets of choice were my peers rather than the teacher - I eventually got caught and had my account locked for 6 months as punishment. I don't recall exactly how I got caught, but no doubt it was something dumb and avoidable like talking about it.
I'm wondering if people like you have grown up to be the people who break user interfaces needlessly, write cookie popups, integrate ads and telemetry, and force updates on things that don't need them.
In other words, did you grow out of your childish shenanigans or are you just getting paid for them now?
Wrote about this as a college senior for my computer security class. Spent a day or two in the TAMU computer lab with that site prominently displayed… that was 22 years ago. I did set up 2 computers to demo how this worked as part of the presentation but never went much further than that. I seem to remember my report including hypothetical ways to use a tool I think was called silkworm or silk wrapper to disguise this as something else for distribution. Time flies.
This brings me many good memories of my script kiddie humble beginnings.
It all started with backoriffice and mIrc and slowly it evolved to me wanting to run bitchX and eventually getting into linux. It probably took me an year to go from being a windows user to exclusively run Slackware and poring over Phrack :)
Seeing the title of post I immediately felt sentimental. It so funny to understand actually understand that so many people were socialized with the same tools. I recently found the tools compilation CDs my brother used to assemble with all those tools. Having Back Orifice on a random computer on the internet was somehow the first feeling what the internet ment without knowing actually what to do with that. I additionally remember spending hours on SoftICE (My biggest success was to discover that the only license key to the Siemens webwasher adblocker was 'Mr Nuts'.) I wonder if is there similarly innocent things today's script kiddie's do.
I played with ircii scripting, one time I made a bot (probably copied some script from somewhere) that would op folks with a hardcoded irc usermask list.
I then ran one with just a mode that would op anybody upon joining and then when I'd run into folks who were all into bots, I was like "yeah I have one you can borrow for your channel," and then they'd invite it and op the thing, and then it would start opping everybody who joined and the prior owner of the channel would get all ornery about it.
lol irc was like the crackhouse of the internet to me.
As more of our lives have become intertwined with computing infrastructure, why shouldn't they be? If you routinely broke classroom resources or messed with the HVAC you'd probably be expelled too.
My very first “school computer incident” was so innocent by comparison for most people.
I was maybe 11 and I was learning about batch files and I made one named win.bat that printed “hello”. Well I’m sure most folks know what happened next time the computer rebooted …hello hello hello hello hello…and the computer teacher said I had installed a virus and tried to kick me out of school. Luckily I was only expelled from computer class for the rest of the year.
Oh man brings back so many memories of messing with friends. There was even a doom version that modeled monsters after system processes allowing you to shoot and kill the processes and watch them die
My University had public, non-firewalled IP addresses in the dorms... all one had to do was scan the IP ranges for the default port for Back Orifice to have some fun. (The good old days)
My first year at university I took over the student radio program and found such a computer had been left online for months directly connected to the internet. It was so pwned the mouse would struggle to move.
I wish to this day I’d imaged the hard drive before formatting it. It’d have been so much fun to boot up in a VM to play with today.
The BO payload was so large that it was hard to inject or distribute without pretty obviously being suspicious.
A friend developed Fraggle Lite in ASM with separate versions for the network adapter, which became the world's smallest RAT for a while. I never found the Easter egg, but I do remember the original password for our hardcoded users. I wonder if I still have them somewhere...
Mannnnn the nostalgia. I loved programs like this and Sub7c my favorite was DivineIntervention 3 I just liked the interface and thought the name was cool lol. I’d love to see what all the devs of these things are up to today. Pri$m, if you’re out there let it be known that your work on DI3 is what got me into programming!
Glad to see I was not the only script kiddie here, haha. I used them all: bo, netbus, sub7... To be honest back in my days it was not as fun to hack somebody, digital cameras were expensive as heck back then, people had just a few pictures on their computers which they usually scanned, no webcams... It took me a week to infect this girl I had a crush on, when I finally did all I found on her computer was a bunch of mp3s. Well, at least I learned her music taste. Not everyone had a computer back then. It was not cannon as it is today.
Soon after I wrote my first chat in Java, that use the same principles of client and server. The server would even work with telnet. Fun times indeed.
No specific, it was fun because I had a crush on her. A little bit after that I started dating a girl who went to the same school as me, and she told me she and her friends would look at the signing list at the library to see what I was reading. Back then you had to checkout a book in order to take it home with you from the library, and they used pen and paper.
I guess I was also stalked, just not digitally, haha.
I'm sorry but you literally described breaking into someone's computer in order to snoop on them. You expressed disappointment that there were no photographs and you closed with "fun times". I don't have to do anything to 'make' this looks like abhorrent behaviour.
I installed Netbus on the public computers at my local community library. They ran Windows 98 and were connected directly to the internet via a T1 / frame relay connection with a public IP for each machine, no firewall. So I could sit at home and keylog people’s Hotmail passwords. Those were the days ….
I ran some training labs full of desktop PCs around the time that BO was released and it was a fantastic tool. It was free and offered a wide range of features for remote administration that win95/98 didn’t have. I could power cycle, re-image, push install .exes, control user accounts, etc all with a free tool. With BO I had complete control of all systems in the lab at a time where that sort of tooling for “legit” uses was prohibitively expensive.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadI think we did it to a classmate once :)
> “ However, use of NetBus has had serious consequences. In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBus
I got revenge couple of months later with a "screensaver" that I've made in Delphi. In reality it would just "crash" with some random error, but actually copy itself on multiple places on the hard drive with windows sounding names, run both as a service and some innocent sounding files etc. It wouldn't show up in task manager. I could send and execute whatever commands I liked. I've deleted his Diablo saves a week later or so, and man he was livid as he wasted months playing. He had no idea what happened as he had two AV programs installed and he was confident it would detect a trojan.
Windows security at that period of time really was a contradiction in terms.
Interesting to read on Wikipedia that work on Sub7 resumed in June this year.
But that kind of stuff is what got me interested in computers and programming back in junior high. Learned the basics of control statements and OOP in a fun engaging way. I made an AOL chatroom mailserver with sendkeys :D and later became more advanced using APIs. These were very much like mIRC but AOL hosted all the files so even better. There were private chatrooms based on just making these things and prewritten libraries floating around. Who remembers genocide.bas?(hey I didn't name it) Anybody have these? I have copies somewhere on a zip drive.
Remember punters? In dialup days you could flood a person with chat messages containing html heading tags that would slow them down rendering to the point they could never catch up. Others eventually found exploits that could crash the app on one message.
The Trojans for AOL were also pretty good. Would capture the password field and once connected open an email in the background and send it wherever, then delete sent. Back then though you could as easily just say you are an admin and ask someone for their password. Your whole neighborhood probably openly sharing through netbeui.
I think it's long enough ago to say I ran an FTP on mirc and the password was like the 5th word on the xdrive free account confirmation page. They started at $2 a referral and I bought a nice 17" ViewSonic monitor to play Quake on in the 8th grade. Other friends bought whole computers. Shut that down when the FTP got hacked and I got a cease and desist letter for 3d studio max, thought the law was coming to break down my door. After that I mellowed out.
NetBus was the GREATEST Win95/98 remote admin/spying software outside BO.
Network scan? Don’t mind if I do. Huh. So many machines. Let’s see what windows they have open.
alt.sex.grannies (or whatever it was back in the day)
Fire off a message “NO. Turn that off. C’mon, man.”
Actually got a reply back.
“OK. I’m sorry.”
Do the title bar refresh and see it’s closed.
That was my favoritest random memory of NetBus in the wild.
In other words, did you grow out of your childish shenanigans or are you just getting paid for them now?
I now manage a massive HPC cluster for a world renowned university. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[0] http://web.textfiles.com/software/silkrope.txt
I fondly remember writing an anime news bot, that scraped a anime news site and spammed it into one of my channels.
I didn't know what HTTP, HTML, loops, or even arrays where. I copy-pasted everything from countless sources I found.
Good times.
I then ran one with just a mode that would op anybody upon joining and then when I'd run into folks who were all into bots, I was like "yeah I have one you can borrow for your channel," and then they'd invite it and op the thing, and then it would start opping everybody who joined and the prior owner of the channel would get all ornery about it.
lol irc was like the crackhouse of the internet to me.
mIRC was far more accessible to me than programming anything more simple than a text based adventure in BASIC. Then I got into Perl :D
I was maybe 11 and I was learning about batch files and I made one named win.bat that printed “hello”. Well I’m sure most folks know what happened next time the computer rebooted …hello hello hello hello hello…and the computer teacher said I had installed a virus and tried to kick me out of school. Luckily I was only expelled from computer class for the rest of the year.
Me: "I bet I can guess your password..." I said to a close friend.
Him: "No way. $50 says you can't".
Another friend: "Stupid bet".
Me: "eatme8"
Him: <speechless>, turning red with rage.
Another friend: "Holy shit".
Needless to say my late 20's were a lot of fun, very little of which I could do now without serious repercussions.
http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
Though I'm skeptical it was ever part of a windows root kit.
I wish to this day I’d imaged the hard drive before formatting it. It’d have been so much fun to boot up in a VM to play with today.
A friend developed Fraggle Lite in ASM with separate versions for the network adapter, which became the world's smallest RAT for a while. I never found the Easter egg, but I do remember the original password for our hardcoded users. I wonder if I still have them somewhere...
Soon after I wrote my first chat in Java, that use the same principles of client and server. The server would even work with telnet. Fun times indeed.
I guess I was also stalked, just not digitally, haha.
Stop trying to make things look sexist
It used to log keystrokes but also the title of the window.
Well... I wasn't looking for anything in particular, I was to about 12-13 and just into computers and didn't even have internet at home.
Well to make it short, there was a lot of porn websites visiting. At all times of the day.
Which in retrospect is immensely weird considering this was a public place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BackOffice_Server
Back Orifice was basically a rootkit avant la lettre.