4 ms·
“Cool exploit“? Like net send? :)
by taneq 3y ago
“Cool exploit“? Like net send? :)
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoI was banned from the school computer suites several times for (ab)using net send. Good times.
- adenner 3y agoI remember someone getting a bit wild with their netsend and accidentally spamming the entire school district, including the administration. We also found out that you could DoS your instructor with enough messages.
- myself248 3y agoOn our high-school network, the Guest account had NET SEND privileges. It was somehow less chaotic than one might expect. We had a single shared T1 pipe for the whole district. Which was enough for email and stuff, but when web browsers got popular, it was suddenly woefully inadequate. So I figured out I could NET SEND * SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 9 MINUTES OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE YOUR WORK AND LOG OUT and after a flurry of traffic, the network fell to nearly-idle. I could max out the T1 with whatever I needed to do for a few minutes, then NET SEND * SERVER ROOM POWER RESTORED and nobody would be the wiser. The admin did go check on the "flaky UPS" a few times before looking closely at the message. Had a good laugh and told me not to use it too often.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoA great story and true BSOD material!
- myself248 3y agoBOFH?
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoThanks. This was what I was going for but my brain had other ideas.
- pixl97 3y agoThis is along the lines of my early days learning about computers at school. I saw executables were filled with weird junk when looked at in a text viewer. So I'd load a little of that junk in a file and add CRITICAL DISK ERROR. TURN OFF SYSTEM TO AVOID CATASTROPHIC DATA LOSS and then printed it out to a system printer students didn't have access too. So you got a page of random symbols and that error. Little did I know the company adding more computers to the network was there that day and the guy panicked and had the system shut down, it was down the next day too. I never did ask what happened to bring attention to myself, and this was before we had individual accounts in the system.
- em-bee 3y agothe key "feature" of the exploit was the ability to send messages anonymously. the unix commands "write" and "wall" allow you to send a message to any users terminal. apparently "wall" has a switch "-n" to hide the sender https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/99460/sending-messages-to-another-user https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/99460/sending-messa... for windows there was "net send" which could be exploited by a tool called NetSendFaker, but this was 1991, so i doubt that already existed.
- yencabulator 3y agoThere was a time on some UNIXes where you could just write to other people's ttys, no write/wall needed, just echo >/dev/... Making write/wall sgid, and restricting tty write access to that group, was a significant security upgrade back in the day.
- gadders 3y agoI remember in the mid to late 90's when you could get spam from outside of your network via net send. Happy days...
- jethro_tell 3y agoWall
- fullstop 3y agoI was able to use samba to generate these messages such that they looked like they came from other users in the lab. We had a lot of fun with that.