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Hacker infects 18,000 "script kiddies" with fake malware builder
- sylware 2y agoShall we talk about all those hacker systems protected on clouds? (microsoft|aws|gogol|akamai/linode|cloud.cn|etc)
- jamal-kumar 2y agoThey talk about this like it's a new phenomenon but I distinctly remember this being super common in the windows 95 to vista days. Like I went to some kid's house and he would do something like try and tell everyone he knew how to 'hack google' and he used use some obviously sketchy as hell tool which just ran a whois on their domain to show their address, and this was all the evidence that he was 'hacking', and we all clowned on him for it and how he probably just installed a virus on himself. He ended up finding some extremely obvious viruses some kid thought would be funny to leave on a network share at school called something like 'sexyporn.jpg.exe' and getting expelled for being daft enough to execute them
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lupusreal 2y agoWe used to run `tree` and tell the computer lab teacher we were hacking the school, government, etc. It always got a strong reaction out of her, she was a good typing instructor (and a genuinely nice person) but was out of her depth with computers. What little shits we were.
- seattle_spring 2y agoMe and a buddy got expelled for "hacking the school network" by using "net send" to interrupt our teacher's presentations.
- sbarre 2y agoExpelled or suspended? Expulsion seems disproportionate for that kind of prank.
- vrighter 2y agoyou wouldn't believe how scary computers were to most people. Once i added a batch file with the shutdown command in the startup folder of one computer, as a prank (trivially fixable by booting into safe mode) and got banned from the computer rooms because "i compromised every computer in the school" apparently. They never discovered the rats we actually had installed on all their computers. They were still there years after I left, until they upgraded the computers.
- sbarre 2y agoI was in high school in the late 80s and early 90s, I'm well aware. :-) We (a few friends and I) were basically the Novell Netware admins because our school didn't have a full-time computer tech and none of the teachers knew anything about it. We convinced them to let us help them in exchange for letting us read the manuals and tinker around, and we actually did help with problems and troubleshooting, mostly printing if I remember. They never figured out it meant we also had access to the teacher-only folders though.
- vrighter 2y agowe did too ;)
- Uehreka 2y agoOh man, the days before blocking net send was a common school sysadmin practice… Back when I was a highschool freshman (2004-05) I wrote a batch script that would fire off net sends to everyone in the computer lab in rapid succession in an infinite loop, then just sort of left it on a shared drive with a conspicuous name. Sure enough, a few days later, someone ran it out of curiosity and got in trouble, but of course the file had my username in the metadata, and my computer teacher was like “Chris, you knew what you were doing, don’t do this again.” It was the kind of “good clean fun” sort of prank that doesn’t get you in hot water or suspended, but was hilarious to watch play out. Edit: Just re-read and saw that your friend got expelled for doing basically the same thing I did. That sucks. I’ll note that I went to an IT-focused votech school, so I think a lot of folks had a better sense of perspective as to how serious net send pranks actually were in the grand scheme of things.
- throw16180339 2y agoOur school used macOS classic, so I used Quitter (https://www.pliner.com/oursoftware/quitter/ https://www.pliner.com/oursoftware/quitter/) to wreak havoc by closing programs on remote machines.
- atum47 2y agoI saw that back in the 90's when I was a script kiddie myself. Programs that we use to hack others like back orifice or netbus were being distributed infected
- todd3834 2y agoI can confirm this personally as I had an infected version of Sub7. I thought it was so fun to mess with my parents with it until I realized I was now compromised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub7
- scrapcode 2y agoAh, the good ole' days of opening my friend(s) cd-rom drives. I was a wizard.
- myself248 2y agoWhat I saw, as often as not, is that the skiddies using these tools would configure their installer/dropper and start sending it to victims, but accidentally run it on their own machine too. Meaning their own machine was now listening for control connections. Which meant all a potential victim had to do was accept the file, not run it (renaming the extension was a good first step), and note the IP address of the skiddy who sent it to them. Inspect the file to see the port and password configured therein, run the control program, connect back to the origin IP with the given port and password, et voila. I wonder how many of them thought their tool was backdoored, not realizing it was they who had compromised themselves.
- meroes 2y agoSeems like every installation had a backdoor password hardcoded too from that article.
- bdcravens 2y agoI remembered playing around with Back Orifice, and absolutely knowing better, but being the kid (early 20s) who couldn't help but see "what will this do", turned on the server. Within seconds someone began wiping c:/Windows/system lol.
- 752963e64 2y ago[dead]
- aaza 2y agoYears ago when DDoS tools were being distributed on 4chan I fixed a bug in one of them and redistributed it there. My fixed version also had the handy feature of having a 50% chance of wiping the user's entire drive if they actually used it as part of a DDoS. It was pleasingly brutal. First it would zero out and delete all files in the user's home directory, and then if it had access to the hard disk device it would overwrite the sectors directly from the start onwards. If not, it would iterate through all other files and corrupt whatever it had access to. I'm satisfied to report that hundreds of script kiddies had their data irreversibly destroyed before my handiwork was noticed. I hope it was a valuable lesson to them.
- junon 2y agoWas this a particular tool that required charging up a lazer, by chance? If so, I might have been one of the people you taught a lesson to. :D
- wrs 2y agoHow did you feel about it? Were you dissuaded from further script-kiddieing?
- junon 2y agoWell, yes and no. I was more interested in what it did and how it worked rather than 'using' it, I just remember it causing a lot of problems. But yes, this was around the time I learned not to run random executables I found on the internet.
- throwaway5752 2y agoI was going to ask you the same thing as wrs, and would have answered similarly. Overall I am grateful for people like aaza for helping others to understand how it felt to be on the receiving end, and also a lesson about trust and maturity. "There is no honor among thieves" is a facile interpretation, but over time I've come to feel like this is necessary tough love for certain problem kids who might be too clever for their own good at certain points of life.
- junon 2y agoThis happened a lot on old gaming forums where hacks were being produced. When I was much younger I looked up to a game cheats writer on an old forum since he taught me about how they worked, which I found extremely cool (still do!). It actually formed my initial interest in security. I asked if I could help somehow, as all young, eager noobs at the time did, and to my surprise he said yes. He wanted to track the licenses he sold to which accounts via IRC. The game would boot, hacks get injected, hacks connected to IRC and would interact with an mIRC bot to check them on his own machine. That was my first foray into socket programming and protocols, too. A while after that, I learned my code had been shared with another cheats maker (not itself a problem for me) when I was contacted to add DCC SEND support, which allowed sending files via IRC. I don't remember if I came to the conclusion myself or if it was explicitly stated, but either way, the objective was clear, and I refused. I felt bad, had learned my lesson, and never contributed to that scene again. That was in ca. 2006 or so. This has been going on for a long, long time.
- doublerabbit 2y agoSame kind of kidhood. At school a social reject but during the night a script kiddie shovelling content across IRC and FTP sites.
- mastablasta 2y ago[dead]
- thenthenthen 2y agoI miss those days tho
- danielbln 2y agoOh hi, another one of those checking in. IRC, Grim's Ping, FTP/FXP (preferably the WinNT machines where files could be made undeleteable). Those were the days.
- dfsegoat 2y ago
- billy99k 2y agoMany years ago, I created a 'gold hack' for fun for a popular game when I was in highschool. I reverse-engineered the 'encrypted' (which was basic letter shifting) password stored for the account and my hack basically just decrypted the password and emailed me the username/password. I got 100s of accounts, but never really did anything with them.
- meter 2y agoIn middle school we had a “computer” class where we’d learn how to type, as well as navigate a computer. This was Windows 2000 days. As a prank, my friends and I would do the following: * Hide all the icons on the desktop * Trigger an error message * Take a screenshot of the whole screen * Open the screenshot in MS Paint * Carefully paint over the error message to say “You’ve been hacked.” * Change the desktop background to be the screenshot above * Restore all the icons. You’d end up with a convincing looking error message that wouldn’t close, obviously. The next class, the teacher lectured us for 45 minutes on the definition of “script kiddy” vs. “real hacker” and how we should be embarrassed. This made the whole thing even funnier. It’s true though, I was a script kiddie.
- rikafurude21 2y agohardcoding tokens seems like script kiddie behaviour to be honest
- sim7c00 2y agoclassic. this has happened not only to script kiddies, many times in the past. build your own tools. it will teach you properly how shit works, elevating your hacking skills and free you from this common risk. Assume there are no trusted sources for hacking tools.
- ForOldHack 2y agoObligatory: Ha ha.
- neilv 2y agoI hadn't heard the term "script kiddie" in a very long time. But it seems that's most of what Software Engineers do lately, spending most of our coding time figuring out the arbitrary bureaucracy (not fundamentals, nor insightful inventions) dumped on us, by the massive piles of stuff churned out by other people. Such that we understand very little of what we do, and consequently create very little. Do people still say "script kiddie", or does it resonate a lot differently than it used to, maybe a little too close to home?
- jimt1234 2y ago> ...checks the Windows Registry for signs it is running on a virtualized environment and stops if the results are positive. That caught my eye ^^^ Is there any virtualization software that makes VM environments indistinguishable from a "bare metal" environment?
- scaredhana 2y ago[flagged]
- scaredhana 2y ago[flagged]
- p3rls 2y agoWho didn't run whatever they could find in "steal this computer book" section of the library when they were a kid? One publisher could have taken us all out. I was accidentally running the .bats on my own computer half the time already.
- neurostimulant 2y ago> Once a machine is infected, the XWorm malware checks the Windows Registry for signs it is running on a virtualized environment and stops if the results are positive. Many (if not all) malwares do this now. Does this mean you don't need an antivirus when you run windows on a vm because any malware that happen to infect it would kill themselves when they noticed they're running inside a vm?
- 14 2y agoI have trust issues with a lot of software free from random sources. Lots of YouTube videos trying to sell you on all sorts of weird programs all you have to do is go to some random weird site and download and run as administrator and ignore all the red flags. For me I wanted an autoclicker for a few things. All sorts of sketchy sites and YouTubers recommending downloading some crap others would say is a virus and others would say are a false positive. I ended up finding a tutorial on how to write a python program and made my own autoclicker. This will be a lesson these script kiddies probably needed. They are lucky as it does not seem nearly as bad as it could be in terms of malware.
- catnap113911 2y agoRoblox
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