4 ms·

Speaking of interaction with the admin. Back in the days when I was in school, the computer lab ran a Honeywell mainframe with terminals. I wrote a program em

by ww520 4y ago

Speaking of interaction with the admin. Back in the days when I was in school, the computer lab ran a Honeywell mainframe with terminals. I wrote a program emulating the logon screen to intercept the username and password of the unsuspecting students logging on and to email them to me. I was going to post the list of all the usernames and passwords at the end of the semester on the wall. I dubbed it the Fishing project with my friends (yes, that's before all the phishing activities went rampant). I collected dozens of usernames and passwords before the professor of my CS class stopped me one day after class and said, you better stop whatever you're doing. Apparently the system saved the typing of all sessions and the admin actually went through all of them. The next semester all the terminals had a physical switch installed that had to be pressed to reset the terminal before logon. That killed any running program. I was glad to play a small part in improving the security of my school lab.

doctor_eval 4y ago
That’s quite similar to my story. While at high school, I wrote an innocent program to open the terminals at the nearby college for chat sessions - nothing nefarious. The sysadm saw what I did and realised I could use it to phish passwords. Next time I went to use the computer lab, the terminals were locked down. Showing my age but this would have been 1984 or so… a remarkably early contribution to security?
- ww520 4y ago
  So we all are ;)
BrandoElFollito 3y ago
This is more or less how I started to administer the unix cluster at my uni in 1993 as a student. I wrote a fake su program that woul d impersonate the real one, asked the admin to help with something, got the root password and went to them to tell them the password a few days later. And offered my help in exchange of a seat at their shared office and my own workstation. They were glad to get someone because unix was new to them (they were using Novell). It was new to me too but I learned a huge amount of things that were actually bootstrap my IT career after my PhD.

by ww520 4y ago

doctor_eval 4y ago

That’s quite similar to my story. While at high school, I wrote an innocent program to open the terminals at the nearby college for chat sessions - nothing nefarious. The sysadm saw what I did and realised I could use it to phish passwords. Next time I went to use the computer lab, the terminals were locked down. Showing my age but this would have been 1984 or so… a remarkably early contribution to security?

ww520 4y ago
So we all are ;)

BrandoElFollito 3y ago

This is more or less how I started to administer the unix cluster at my uni in 1993 as a student. I wrote a fake su program that woul d impersonate the real one, asked the admin to help with something, got the root password and went to them to tell them the password a few days later. And offered my help in exchange of a seat at their shared office and my own workstation. They were glad to get someone because unix was new to them (they were using Novell). It was new to me too but I learned a huge amount of things that were actually bootstrap my IT career after my PhD.