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Being a hacker in the early days of computers must have been so fun and accessable
literally ran a basic wardialer in my area code and had guest access to multiple government systems. I felt like matthew broderick would have been so proud.
I never got anywhere but it freaked my parents out they were not proud like i had been expecting at all.
Never actually messed around with anything besides figuring out the no password guest accounts so not really thrilling but it was super easy to get access.
Also when email was first a thing you could just telnet to port 25 on a server and write raw SMTP messages and most servers would just accept them. You would say yes this message is coming from [email protected] and it would say sure thing!
That's still true, I was explaining this at work to the sysadmin that they should be careful and they said our email addresses couldn't be spoofed, so I demonstrated it with his address. Spooked him a bit.
Leader: "Alright, while he's working on breaking into their system, we'll--"
Hacker: "I'm in."
Leader: "That fast? Did you find some zero-day to exploit?"
Hacker who just tried username "admin", password "password": "Yyyyeeeeeees?"
To this day, database hacks (top 1000 most popular passwords) and reverse hacks (a few popular passwords on a few thousand accounts) still often result in successful penetrations.
The weakest security link is between chair and keyboard.
I mean, technically, that is a zero-day exploit
Until your mom grounded you for hogging the phone line.
It would’ve been amazing to be part of the culture back in the days of phreaking.
It was fun, indeed. People knew so little about the implications and possibilities of connecting two systems, that even if you didn’t hack anything worthwhile, it was easy to feel like a genius simply by war-dialing into another local nerd’s own Commodore 64.
The door was basically left wide open. You could do whatever you wanted with ease.