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Back in the dial-up days you could disconnect someone by adding ATH commands to a ping payload field.
by NitpickLawyer 2y ago
Back in the dial-up days you could disconnect someone by adding ATH commands to a ping payload field.
- brontitall 2y agoOnly if their modem didn’t implement the Hayes command set properly or you could otherwise control the per-character timing of the OS sending. It required a pause (1sec by default), “+++” with no pauses, another pause, _then_ the ATH command
- wat10000 2y agoWhich was fairly common, as Hayes had a patent on those pauses.
- brontitall 2y agoHuh, TIL. I guess they might have used TIES https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequen...
- NitpickLawyer 2y agoI had an external USRobotics 56k modem, I was immune. But the many many "bulk" no-name modems were vulnerable. You could ping entire ranges of dial-up IPs and watch the results on big IRC channels. Uhmmm, allegedly :)
- mycall 2y agoCommas provided 2 second pauses
- brontitall 2y agoOnly in the dial string to ATD, surely?
- cryptoegorophy 2y agoI remember you could brute force passwords by brute forcing in sequence single characters to access anyone’s disk on a giant dialup network. Crazy times.
- bslanej 2y agoI’m too lazy to look it up but there was some string you could send over IRC that would make some routers drop the connection immediately - if you pasted that string in a big channel you would see dozens of people immediately disconnect.
- aaronmdjones 2y agoAn 0x01 control character (CTCP) followed by DCC SEND whatever 0 0 0 https://modern.ircdocs.horse/dcc#dcc-send https://modern.ircdocs.horse/dcc#dcc-send This caused the DCC ALG helper in ancient Linux kernels to close the connection, as they failed to parse 0 as a valid IP address. Users connecting to IRC servers over TLS were immune, as the ALG helper in the router could not observe the traffic. This is what breaks DCC in general -- to use DCC on IRC while connecting to the server over TLS and behind a NAT, you must instruct your client to use a specific range of ports for DCC and preforward those ports to your machine in your router, as the ALG helper cannot mark the incoming connection as RELATED (and forward it through to you) as it cannot see the outgoing command that caused the incoming connection to occur. You must also instruct your client to determine the correct external IP address to advertise, as the ALG helper will be unable to rewrite it when the router does masquerading.
- genewitch 2y agoOn AOL in chatrooms you could play sounds, so if you sent S{/con/con As the sound, you could crash anyone on windows that hadn't shut off user sounds. My memory is a bit hazy and I don't want to look up the exact sequence, but that's close enough.
- genewitch 2y agohttps://mazur-archives.s3.amazonaws.com/aol-files/breaches/con2k.htm https://mazur-archives.s3.amazonaws.com/aol-files/breaches/c... it was `{S /con/con`; my memory transposed two characters. the {S was the "system message" that AOL chatrooms used to send sounds, so that sequence of characters after a newline made your computer look for that sound. It was cool if everyone was trusted to not do the /con/con, people would have email chains with the audio files on them, like a proto-napster.
- vv_ 2y agoHilariously, the PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) is still used in modern IoT modules. It is actually the only way to run your own TCP/IP stack (and maintain control over TLS), as not all modules support QMI or MBIM.