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Since no one has mentioned it yet, you could finger your ISP to see other usernames logged in. Those usernames had email addresses like <username>@your.isp, and
by ASalazarMX 5y ago
Since no one has mentioned it yet, you could finger your ISP to see other usernames logged in. Those usernames had email addresses like <username>@your.isp, and their passwords sometimes were the same username, or something equally silly.
If you think cybersecurity is in a sorry state now, 80s and 90s were much, much worse.
- stickfigure 5y agoAh fingerd. In the early 90s, Cal Poly decided to put the entire campus on a cluster of AIX machines (a dozen PS/2s surrounding a 3090 mainframe). Fingering a user would display the contents of the .plan file in their home directory. Fingerd on AIX ran as root, and would follow symlinks. Replace your .plan with a symlink, finger yourself, and you could read any file on the system... the home directories, email mailboxes, everything of ten thousand students and instructors. I didn't abuse this, but I'm sure others did. I kept everything "personal" on the CSc department machines.