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  • 113 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 19th, 2023
  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What was hacking like in the '80s and '90s?English
    26·
    20 days ago

    In 1999+ you could sniff people’s passwords in clear text right out of the air on public WiFi networks. tcpdump port 110 and just watch them roll in.

    In the late 90’s you could use a floppy disk to boot nt and dump the password hashes of anybody who had logged in, then run them through a dictionary attack which would take a matter of minutes before learning that your company’s top employees used their favorite football team or cartoon character as their password without even appending some numbers to it. Dude with the football password even had the password emblazoned in his office wall.

    One time in the 90’s I got to a password prompt and just held enter, and eventually was just let past the password prompt.

    In X windows if you managed to kill the screensaver password entry box you were dropped back to the desktop, and people found ways to crash the screensaver by overrunning the password input buffer by pasting input repeatedly using common keyboard shortcuts. (Pretty sure this same exact bug exited in early Mac osx versions.)

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldtoLinux@programming.dev•Hacked PC - random sounds playingEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    Run strace (or falco) and log every file open. When you hear the sound, reference the log of what files were accessed at that time.

    Run tcpdump and capture all traffic. Analyze it in wireshark, searching for a time window around when the sounds happened.

    FWIW putting pranks like this in cron or systemd is a common way to haze people who have bad security practices. We also used to set the default run level to 3 or 6, but of course that doesn’t make sense in the era of systemd.