Cracking 101

April 26, 2005 9:47 AM

Fighting a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent. [Via MoFi]
posted by AlexReynolds (35 comments total)

shut up i hack you
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:54 AM on April 26, 2005

I've been using IRC for more than ten years now, and have been wondering where new IRC users come from? I haven't ever convinced a single person to join IRC, and it's not really talked about anywhere, but as the op for a dev channels on the undernet, sure enough we get new users in a regular basis.

Thoughts?
posted by furtive at 10:04 AM on April 26, 2005

^for a few dev channels^
posted by furtive at 10:04 AM on April 26, 2005

8?)
posted by magullo at 10:07 AM on April 26, 2005

only gurlz hide behind fire walls^^
posted by nofundy at 10:09 AM on April 26, 2005

It's almost too good to be true! Thanks for the great read.
posted by escapevelocity at 10:21 AM on April 26, 2005

ow i hack me
posted by Slagman at 10:31 AM on April 26, 2005

Wow... not too many text items can cause me to laugh out loud while I'm sitting by myself, but that definitely did it!
posted by clevershark at 10:34 AM on April 26, 2005

;o)

And the meek shall inherit the earth ...
posted by homodigitalis at 10:37 AM on April 26, 2005

I don't really believe this is true, it's a nice story tho :P.

For those who aren't technically inclined: they gave the "hacker" an IP address of 127.0.0.1 which is the "loopback" ip address. This means that the "hacker" was deleting his own hard drives.
posted by malphigian at 10:45 AM on April 26, 2005

Psssssssssssst! Don't tell any hacker secrets ...
posted by homodigitalis at 10:46 AM on April 26, 2005

How do I give myself a Jackson?
posted by Cyrano at 10:49 AM on April 26, 2005

Reminds me of this bit of social engineering.
posted by orthogonality at 10:51 AM on April 26, 2005

Cyrano: are you serious? Jackson = 20 = a break.
But you probably already knew that.

I must say, I haven't heard that one in a while...
posted by mystyk at 10:55 AM on April 26, 2005

I hack you! I hack you! I hack you!

Anti-Semite! Nice marmot!
posted by WolfDaddy at 11:01 AM on April 26, 2005

But you probably already knew that.

Nope. Never heard the phrase before. I assumed it was referring to a 20 somehow, but I was secretly hoping it was some kind of new, perverted Michael reference.
posted by Cyrano at 11:05 AM on April 26, 2005

What a post! Clearly the best of the internet!
posted by spock at 11:08 AM on April 26, 2005

So when is this thread going to be raided by the Secret Service?

The term 'hacker' has been co-opted more than 'liberal' or 'conservative.'
Unless you type 1337* I don't think your obsessive enough to really be in the running.
(*note: I don't and I'm not)

Perhaps the guy watched the Hackers movie with Angelina Jolie too many times?
posted by Smedleyman at 11:17 AM on April 26, 2005

Hey, Hackers is pretty dopey in a lot of ways, but there are moments where somebody clearly knew what they were talking about when it came to hacking. They had a much better script consultant than something like The Net.
posted by willnot at 11:32 AM on April 26, 2005

Wow, spock! Seems that if you already knew about it, you could find it!
posted by kenko at 11:34 AM on April 26, 2005

Seems that if you already knew about it, you could find it!

Searching Google is for Advanced Beginners Only.
posted by AlexReynolds at 11:38 AM on April 26, 2005

Good stuff. Too long for a submission to bash?
posted by blendor at 11:40 AM on April 26, 2005

Reminds me of:

<bike-w> wtf is raw partition and how do make one in linux
<fet-w> bike - dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1
<bike-w> fet: wtf did the command do?
<commando[w]> it produced a field of zeros across your hard drive
<bike-w> how do reverse that.
<bike-w> cus i can't see shit.
<commando[w]> and if u did /dev/hda1
<commando[w]> thats like yer c:
<bike-w> i'm serious.
<bike-w> wtf do i to get it back
<bike-w> i gotta rebuild?
<bike-w> fet you suck.
posted by fet at 12:36 PM on April 26, 2005

willnot writes "They had a much better script consultant than something like The Net."

I know the script consultant, and I can assure you that he knew what he was talking about.
posted by clevershark at 1:17 PM on April 26, 2005

Strongly reminiscent of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, somehow.
posted by uosuaq at 1:22 PM on April 26, 2005

But some of Hackers just didn't make sense, like when they were pulling pranks on the FBI agent, and one of the hackers signed him up for a kinky online dating service, and all the other hackers were REALLY impressed ...

So how did that stunt prove his hackerness -- especially back then, when everything you signed up for didn't require 3 forms of verification? Anybody could sign somebody up for something, but they were acting like he hacked into NORAD ...

Still though: Hackers was infinitely better than The Net ...
posted by brykmantra at 1:42 PM on April 26, 2005

And wasn't that a userfriendly strip?
posted by Yossarian at 1:46 PM on April 26, 2005

Metafilter: shut up i hack you
posted by mystyk at 2:35 PM on April 26, 2005

oh IRC, will the fun never end?
posted by tiamat at 4:17 PM on April 26, 2005

type +++ ATH0 for something c00l!

oy.
posted by zerokey at 4:21 PM on April 26, 2005

that was freaking awesome!!!
posted by Busithoth at 4:37 PM on April 26, 2005

We've come a long way since the days when we told people that there was a "great FTP server" at 127.0.0.1!

On second thought, maybe not. Still, it beats telling people that pressing "Alt-F4" will give them access to all sorts of new features.
posted by clevershark at 4:52 PM on April 26, 2005

I was secretly hoping it was some kind of new, perverted Michael reference.

Me too! Like head licking or something.
posted by mrgrimm at 5:38 PM on April 26, 2005

I wonder if this story is fabricated.

1) Would the unarmed opponent really not notice that he's affecting his own computer.

2) Is there really a little script out there that will automagically erase a non-firewalled pc's drives with IP info alone? If so, why hasn't some little unarmed opponent modified the script to cycle through all possible IP values, thus taking down the non-firewalled, inter-connected computing world.

This was really amusing, but could it possibly be real?
posted by nobody at 9:58 AM on April 27, 2005

Such tools exist (hence "script kiddie"), but I'd think they almost always depend on security vulnerabilities in unupdated Windows boxes (of which there are many, thanks IMO to the inadequacy of Windows' update system). And yeah, in fact a significant slice of all internet traffic is scripts scanning through IP addresses for vulnerable machines.
posted by abcde at 9:22 PM on April 27, 2005