Nice one Ned! I have my own very minor hacking story that I won't bore you with, however I think most of these exploits boil down to companies trying to save money, and not recognizing the power of a bored, amygdala driven teenaged mind 😉
This brings back my own memories of pwnership of my high school's PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E during the same time in the early 1980s. Like you, I wrote a login simulator (using BASIC) that took advantage of taking ownership of logged-out consoles. After recording their password, the program would respond with an error, and then logout, so the next attempt would work.
I got caught for similar reasons. I was printing out a list of the programs the teachers (escalated privileges, but not root) had access to (pretty much all of which required secondary passwords, so their security was not quite as pathetic as your college's). The chief sysadmin came to the student terminal room; I was already known as a bit of a loose cannon when it came to respecting rules of the computer room; and wanted to check what I was printing out. That got me suspended and probation for the remainder of the year with no access to the computer room, but otherwise nothing. Thank God, no police and no feds. Both of which would transpire today.
RSTS was a notoriously weak OS. It was incredible that the high school shared this computer with students for most of my time in high school. I bought the official DEC book on systems programming using BASIC to do lots of interesting things. The included BASIC was very powerful. Many of the RSTS administrative programs were written in it, including login management.
This entire post reminds me of the book The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. Being myself of a lesser vintage than most of the equipment and software you are talking about here, a lot of what was in that book was my first exposure.
I'm saying it once, and I might say it again: You should write a book, Ned!
Hey man, I'm here from CloudHike, and I just want to say that I don't know shit about hacking or programming (I'm actually a Communication and political science major lol) but this was a joy to read, and I think I might just have to subscribe for future content.
I really enjoy reading your stories about tech back in the day. Thank you for sharing them, and keep them coming.
Nice one Ned! I have my own very minor hacking story that I won't bore you with, however I think most of these exploits boil down to companies trying to save money, and not recognizing the power of a bored, amygdala driven teenaged mind 😉
good read, ty. Also, Mr. Zars is the perfect name for a 20th century high school computer lab teacher.
This brings back my own memories of pwnership of my high school's PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E during the same time in the early 1980s. Like you, I wrote a login simulator (using BASIC) that took advantage of taking ownership of logged-out consoles. After recording their password, the program would respond with an error, and then logout, so the next attempt would work.
I got caught for similar reasons. I was printing out a list of the programs the teachers (escalated privileges, but not root) had access to (pretty much all of which required secondary passwords, so their security was not quite as pathetic as your college's). The chief sysadmin came to the student terminal room; I was already known as a bit of a loose cannon when it came to respecting rules of the computer room; and wanted to check what I was printing out. That got me suspended and probation for the remainder of the year with no access to the computer room, but otherwise nothing. Thank God, no police and no feds. Both of which would transpire today.
RSTS was a notoriously weak OS. It was incredible that the high school shared this computer with students for most of my time in high school. I bought the official DEC book on systems programming using BASIC to do lots of interesting things. The included BASIC was very powerful. Many of the RSTS administrative programs were written in it, including login management.
This entire post reminds me of the book The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. Being myself of a lesser vintage than most of the equipment and software you are talking about here, a lot of what was in that book was my first exposure.
I'm saying it once, and I might say it again: You should write a book, Ned!
Hey man, I'm here from CloudHike, and I just want to say that I don't know shit about hacking or programming (I'm actually a Communication and political science major lol) but this was a joy to read, and I think I might just have to subscribe for future content.