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Did anyone else used to "hack" people on ICQ? If I recall correctly, ICQ would expose users IP address if they didn't intentionally hide it. My friend and I wou

by j2bax 10y ago

Did anyone else used to "hack" people on ICQ? If I recall correctly, ICQ would expose users IP address if they didn't intentionally hide it. My friend and I would get to chatting with strangers and then exchange photos... Only ours wasn't a photo, it was something that opened a backdoor into their computer that would allow us to take over their PC. We never did anything harmful but might have gotten a few people in trouble for looking at naughty websites or freaked them out by printing to their printer or opening and closing their CD drives sporadically. This would have been around 9th grade 1999-ish...

rbinv 10y ago
Sounds like SubSeven.
- sebtoast 10y ago
  I commented on using Back Orifice but Sub7 was another one we used. If I remember correctly BO didn't have a GUI until they (Cult of the dead Cow) updated it to BO2k so it was easier for us kids to use Sub7.
  - piranha 10y ago
    BO surely did have a GUI! Sub7 was dark and sleek though, while BO had a messy office-like look.
    - sebtoast 10y ago
      Thanks, it's been so long I probably just forgot what software we were using that was only command line. I had a folder with a lot of these with virus that I could play with, it was fun, until my sister selected and executed all of them...
- sorenjan 10y ago
  Or NetBus.
  - j2bax 10y ago
    Yep that was the one I remember.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Yeah, I got sent that by someone when I was a teenager. Good thing my ISP blocked incoming ports (not a good thing when I found out that HTTP servers exist, but with all the nuking that went on in the 90s, probably for the best overall).
josefresco 10y ago
Ummm I didn't but I knew people who did ;) ;) Your description matches "my friends" experience 100% Back when hacking was more about pranking and fun.
- j2bax 10y ago
  Yeah it was 100% fun, no malicious intent. Judging by the downvotes, people don't find it amusing. I can see that now that I'm not a dumb teenage... but it made for fond memories none the less! And the fact that pretty non-technical 15 year olds could pull that off in a matter of minutes, probably drove companies to take security a bit more seriously (hopefully)!
  - flukus 10y ago
    It was pre digital photography, so not like anyone had private nudes on their hard drive to poke through.
    - spydum 10y ago
      I can 100% attest that is is a false assumption. </regret>
sebtoast 10y ago
We renamed the BackOrifice server to picture.bmp and used /whois to get the IP address on IRC channels.
Terr_ 10y ago
No, but I was a moderator or helper in #NoHack on DALnet for a while, giving people removal instructions all day :)
- j2bax 10y ago
  Good man. Cleaning up after us snotnose teenage wannabe hackers. :D
Macha 10y ago
Isn't that still an issue with Skype?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
59nadir 10y ago
We used to send trojans to people around the same time. I got particularly consumed by it and started a file on a girl a couple of years older than us (we were around 10-11 at the time). Shit got too real and I ended up seeing a conversation she had with her friend about how she was pregnant and didn't dare tell her parents. It all got too personal, somehow, and I realized I had a window into too much of her life, so I nuked it and never looked back. It was a bad thing to do from the beginning, but at least I learned something about life and after that I had an even bigger interest in computers and programming, as well as the idea of creating something instead of only doing bad things. Shortly after I had my first touch of programming (outside of copying a "Snake" game from a magazine) when I wrote macros for Ultima Online. Thinking back to this time with ICQ and all of this is making me really nostalgic and I sort of wish I could sit in with my old self and talk about the future.
koyote 10y ago
Definitely. I remember an ICQ 'friend' telling me about it. I think that is basically how I got into the deeper end of 'computing': learning about IPs, TCP/IP, playing around with scripts and hacking together my own (or more usually hacking around someone else's code to make it do what I wanted it to do). I sort of miss those days of the internet. I am not sure how to describe it but it felt more free and less restricted. People around me in real life weren't as familiar with it either so it had this weird vibe around it; a lot of it sounded like magic to them. Whenever you mentioned 'The Internet' there was an air of mystery around it.

by j2bax 10y ago

rbinv 10y ago

Sounds like SubSeven.

sebtoast 10y ago
I commented on using Back Orifice but Sub7 was another one we used. If I remember correctly BO didn't have a GUI until they (Cult of the dead Cow) updated it to BO2k so it was easier for us kids to use Sub7.
- piranha 10y ago
  BO surely did have a GUI! Sub7 was dark and sleek though, while BO had a messy office-like look.
  - sebtoast 10y ago
    Thanks, it's been so long I probably just forgot what software we were using that was only command line. I had a folder with a lot of these with virus that I could play with, it was fun, until my sister selected and executed all of them...
sorenjan 10y ago
Or NetBus.
- j2bax 10y ago
  Yep that was the one I remember.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Yeah, I got sent that by someone when I was a teenager. Good thing my ISP blocked incoming ports (not a good thing when I found out that HTTP servers exist, but with all the nuking that went on in the 90s, probably for the best overall).

josefresco 10y ago

Ummm I didn't but I knew people who did ;) ;) Your description matches "my friends" experience 100% Back when hacking was more about pranking and fun.

j2bax 10y ago
Yeah it was 100% fun, no malicious intent. Judging by the downvotes, people don't find it amusing. I can see that now that I'm not a dumb teenage... but it made for fond memories none the less! And the fact that pretty non-technical 15 year olds could pull that off in a matter of minutes, probably drove companies to take security a bit more seriously (hopefully)!
- flukus 10y ago
  It was pre digital photography, so not like anyone had private nudes on their hard drive to poke through.
  - spydum 10y ago
    I can 100% attest that is is a false assumption. </regret>

sebtoast 10y ago

We renamed the BackOrifice server to picture.bmp and used /whois to get the IP address on IRC channels.

Terr_ 10y ago

No, but I was a moderator or helper in #NoHack on DALnet for a while, giving people removal instructions all day :)

j2bax 10y ago
Good man. Cleaning up after us snotnose teenage wannabe hackers. :D

Macha 10y ago

Isn't that still an issue with Skype?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

59nadir 10y ago

We used to send trojans to people around the same time. I got particularly consumed by it and started a file on a girl a couple of years older than us (we were around 10-11 at the time). Shit got too real and I ended up seeing a conversation she had with her friend about how she was pregnant and didn't dare tell her parents. It all got too personal, somehow, and I realized I had a window into too much of her life, so I nuked it and never looked back. It was a bad thing to do from the beginning, but at least I learned something about life and after that I had an even bigger interest in computers and programming, as well as the idea of creating something instead of only doing bad things. Shortly after I had my first touch of programming (outside of copying a "Snake" game from a magazine) when I wrote macros for Ultima Online. Thinking back to this time with ICQ and all of this is making me really nostalgic and I sort of wish I could sit in with my old self and talk about the future.

koyote 10y ago

Definitely. I remember an ICQ 'friend' telling me about it. I think that is basically how I got into the deeper end of 'computing': learning about IPs, TCP/IP, playing around with scripts and hacking together my own (or more usually hacking around someone else's code to make it do what I wanted it to do). I sort of miss those days of the internet. I am not sure how to describe it but it felt more free and less restricted. People around me in real life weren't as familiar with it either so it had this weird vibe around it; a lot of it sounded like magic to them. Whenever you mentioned 'The Internet' there was an air of mystery around it.