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I did the same thing -- wardialed the free-to-dial extensions in the small town that I grew up in. The next day, someone from the gas company knocked on my par
by imroot 5y ago
I did the same thing -- wardialed the free-to-dial extensions in the small town that I grew up in.
The next day, someone from the gas company knocked on my parents door because apparently my war-dialer (who worked during the day when I was at school) knocked offline their monitoring system.
Now-a-days, I'm sure I'd be hauled off to jail instead of a polite request to keep the 13 year old away from the phones for a bit.
- ok123456 5y agoAt one point, I got a knock on the door from some city detective because I dialed someone who, I guess, was the victim of some abuse and used *57, the code for initiating a trace and reporting it to an already assigned investigator. The optimal solution, I mean other than knocking off completely, would have been to use a reverse directory to blacklist all the residential subscribers.
- mindcrime 5y agoInteresting historical tidbit... "back in the day" the phone company often located "interesting" numbers (modem numbers, test numbers, etc.) within a given exchange in the npa-xxx-99zz block, or maybe npa-xxx-9zzz. So a friend and I started war-dialing that block in our local hick town, and found some test loops, ANAC numbers, modem numbers for the switch that served our town, etc, etc. Fun stuff. Then one day right after one of our sessions, we got a call - from the phone company, basically telling us to knock it off before we got into big trouble. I don't remember the exact wording, but that was the gist of it. They knew who we were and where I lived, so that "put the fear of god into us"... briefly. Then we discovered that you could beige-box the line connected to a COCOT[1] sitting at a remote convenience store out in the middle of nowhere at 2:00am and connect a modem to that. One cheapo refurbished "brick" of a "laptop" later, and we'd go out late Sat. night / early Sunday morning and run our scans and login sessions to their switch from this remote payphone. What was nice was this particular phone's demarc box was the kind that had an RJ-11 connector in it, so we didn't even need alligator clips. We just plugged a long telephone extension cord in, parked my car about 50 feet away and sat in there, huddled around the "laptop" and went to work. Good times. And then sometime in the late 90's we all realized that we were old enough to be tried as adults if we got caught, and that the authorities were starting to take this stuff more seriously and that getting busted could have real consequences like not getting hired for jobs, not getting into college, or even jail time. I mean, Operation Sundevil[2] had happened almost 10 years earlier, but we assumed that our risk was limited living in the hick town we lived in, with Barney Fife cops and low-tech telco employees, etc. But at some point we all walked away from that stuff, deeming the risk of continuing to play in that world to be too high. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOT [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
- bredren 5y agoI also ran a war dialer I had downloaded off of a BBS. I woke up a lot of people. After some testing, I ran it only once overnight. The next day we received at least three calls from people who were upset about being woken up. I placed the calls from our family phone number, so my mom answered them. She mentioned these callers but I think she assumed they were confused or something. I did not explain my “experiment” and never got in trouble. But I did not war dial again. It ran all night so I collected a fair amount of data but did absolutely nothing with it. I think I thought I would find some secret line to the White House. Society got its revenge though. Due to spam and robocalls, all unknown calls go to silent for me now, I leave my voicemail “full” and POTS is rarely useful.