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Which books would those be? What exactly was your part in your grey hat days?

at_a_remove 5y ago
I would have to dig through my boxes to find those books. They were rather dense and a little esoteric. The grey hat stuff consisted of things like breaking out of the restrictive policies of my campus to get onto the Internet proper, tricking the equivalent of the (yet to be dubbed) script kiddies to incriminating themselves, and sort of Robin-Hooding accounts back away from a gent who spent a lot of time hacking accounts of various campuses to cause havoc before tying everything up in a neat dossier for someone else to deal with -- there was eventual deportation involved, if I recall, but that may have been just rumor. I did rather discreetly inform the department of my major that their choices of passwords and PINs were not as clever as they thought they were.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  This was in a university setting I take it? I wouldn't have thought the early Internet/NSFNET was exciting enough to hack into. Usenet, yes. But the Internet? Wasn't it just a document retrieval system for scientific work?
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    Well, we couldn't get out to it to even see what was there, which, by then had IRC, gopher, archie, and so on. Usenet. It was all locked away and we were curious. We randomized the exchange listing, split up the results, and then proceeded to war-dial the entire exchange until we found a forgotten (and unprotected) modem line in the math department, which then hosted all of computer science. From there out to what were called "telnet gates," which were known only from rumor and just knowing of them was a commodity in and of itself.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      "Telnet gates" being early form of a static proxy funneled through separate hardware? If so, I could see how they would valuable for ,say, the Kevin Mitnicks of the era.
      - at_a_remove 5y ago
        It was valuable for us, as well, who just wanted to see what was out there.

I would have to dig through my boxes to find those books. They were rather dense and a little esoteric. The grey hat stuff consisted of things like breaking out of the restrictive policies of my campus to get onto the Internet proper, tricking the equivalent of the (yet to be dubbed) script kiddies to incriminating themselves, and sort of Robin-Hooding accounts back away from a gent who spent a lot of time hacking accounts of various campuses to cause havoc before tying everything up in a neat dossier for someone else to deal with -- there was eventual deportation involved, if I recall, but that may have been just rumor. I did rather discreetly inform the department of my major that their choices of passwords and PINs were not as clever as they thought they were.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
This was in a university setting I take it? I wouldn't have thought the early Internet/NSFNET was exciting enough to hack into. Usenet, yes. But the Internet? Wasn't it just a document retrieval system for scientific work?
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  Well, we couldn't get out to it to even see what was there, which, by then had IRC, gopher, archie, and so on. Usenet. It was all locked away and we were curious. We randomized the exchange listing, split up the results, and then proceeded to war-dial the entire exchange until we found a forgotten (and unprotected) modem line in the math department, which then hosted all of computer science. From there out to what were called "telnet gates," which were known only from rumor and just knowing of them was a commodity in and of itself.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    "Telnet gates" being early form of a static proxy funneled through separate hardware? If so, I could see how they would valuable for ,say, the Kevin Mitnicks of the era.
    - at_a_remove 5y ago
      It was valuable for us, as well, who just wanted to see what was out there.