7 ms·

Cult of the Dead Cow Publications

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
This file dated to 08-09-2004 is one of my favorites: http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0395.html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0395.html It's a long read, but worth it. A rather deep psychological and technical profile on how one boy grew up at the height of the BBS warez and hacking scene.
mason55 12y ago
Wow... Cult of the Dead Cow archives... Blast from the past. The Conscience of a Hacker[1] was always one of my favorites during my angsty teen years. [1] http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0012.html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0012.html
christianbryant 12y ago
I grew up in the 80s and remember my first cDc exposure in the early 90s through a co-worker who showed me how to access a command line on the work computer that was used to order books . I remember being in awe of Back Orifice and many plugins that came out back then. I never embraced that life, but I still read these with nostalgia and a bit of jealousy at the technical and mental freedom the underground enjoyed (and still does).
makmanalp 12y ago
Wow, I remember reading some of this stuff when I was younger - just checked the most recent ones. It's surprising that the tone and style is a mix of something (I perhaps a bit pretentiously feel) I grew out of over the years, and thoughtful, elegant prose. If not anything else, it's interesting reading, which is a compliment in itself these days: http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0410.html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0410.html
dunsany 12y ago
I remember seeing these guys at Defcon for the release of Back Orifice 2k. Full-on rockstars
- neals 12y ago
  As a 14 year old kid, I was really into that. Could you share what you saw? (Being from Europe, none of that really reached me back then )
haddr 12y ago
Back orifice! I remember that around 98-99 you could do a simple scan of some dialup networks and always find around ten machines with back orifice installed. A lot of fun for person discovering the state of security of windows machines and networks...
- tacc 12y ago
  I guess that did not last long.
- antr 12y ago
  I used to scan the users at IRC channels for BO (my mirc client had a plugin that did it automatically). I used to get into people's computers (so many were infected!) and checking the stuff they had in their drives... I know that is illegal, but back then the Internet was the Wild West. Among other things I remember seeing some very disturbing self portraits.... I think it was 98-99. The Internet was special back then.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
siberianbear 12y ago
Wow, now that is really a blast from the past. I'm a similar age to the guy who wrote that article and had a similar experience of trying to figure all this stuff out. Blue Boxes (at least where I lived) no longer worked, but black boxes and red boxes worked. I don't know when blue boxes ever worked, but I have the impression it was in the seventies, or at the latest, the early eighties. A black box was a circuit you put on your line to pick up a call without dropping the voltage on the line enough for the phone company to think you'd actually answered. So, your friend could call you long-distance (even internationally) and you could talk to them without them having to pay a long distance charge. The problem was that you could always hear the ringing every few seconds in the background and their voice was attenutated. It was fun and it kinda worked, but I didn't use it that much because it was so annoying. The red box was a device for making free phone calls from pay phones. It faked the tones you inserted for a nickel, a dime, or a quarter. You could just hold it up to the speaker of a pay phone and just hit the button. I built one off a schematic I downloaded. At most pay phones it didn't work at all, but I found two that it worked at. I'd go there and call all my friends in distant states and call them for hours. Every time the operator would come on and ask for money, I'd hold up the device to the speaker and press the "quarter" button a few times. Later I got hold of "hacking" programs for "MCI" codes and other providers. Actually, MCI was more sophisticated that most of the other providers, and quickly shut off hackers. There were a lot of other providers that weren't so smart. The way the programs worked is by dialing an 800 number, some "user ID code" and then a known modem number. If a computer answered (i.e., you got a carrier tone from a modem), you knew that the code was good. If not, you tried another code. These computer programs would just try random codes all day using a known-good modem number and then print you a list of the successful codes. As I started to learn more about this stuff, I did crazier stuff like call all over the world. In this era of Skype it's free to call all over the world, but in 1984 placing international phone calls was really expensive. But I'd call my teenage hacker friends in England and Australia and just chat with them for hours. At retail rates, I was running up a couple of thousand dollars a month in phone charges. Occasionally I'd hear of someone in my circle of friends getting busted in some way, but in my teenage naivete I figured it couldn't happen to me. When I was sixteen and got a driver's license, I met some of the hackers that were within driving distance. One of them got busted at his house: the police arrested him and took all his computer equipment. Since he was a minor he got off with a slap on the wrist, but he didn't get his computers back. I knew that my time was coming soon, since there were already some hints my phone line was being tapped by companies I was stealing from.
niix 12y ago
Amazing. I totally forgot about Cult of the Dead Cow. I remember reading articles on here when I was younger. Edit: Just found this in the apps section `08-01-1998 - "Back Orifice" by Sir Dystic` - so awesome!
- saganus 12y ago
  Back Orifice was an awesome tool. Very fun to play pranks on less knowledgeable friends. I even remember starting to learn Delphi 3 because I met a guy that did a similar tool called Hacker's Paradise, but was later renamed to Admin's Paradise I believe, as he realized this could be used for and sold to admins. He was kind enough to send me the source code and give me a few tips here and there, and man, Object Oriented programming was so hard for me at the time
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hadoukenio 12y ago
Not sure why cDc is on the front page on HN right now, but along the same vein, here's PLA (Phone Losers of America) and it looks like he's still going strong (even has a YouTube channel): http://www.phonelosers.org/
spiritplumber 12y ago
We actually used Back Orifice as a VNC solution for remote assistance.... I forget what we did to make it so it wouldn't cause outside people to poke our remote stations - changed the port number via hex editing, IIRC. The nineties were fun.
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  I did something similar with a friend, it was easier than having him figure out how to configure VNC. Sometimes a "Trojan" is the solution.
cocoflunchy 12y ago
Randomly browsing the archives... "Ebola - Disease of the Year" - Aug 1996 http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/1996/08/ebola---disease.html http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/1996/08/ebola---disease.html
Animats 12y ago
And then they sold out. CdD turned into "L0PHT Heavy Industries" (http://www.l0pht.com/ http://www.l0pht.com/), a computer security firm. That turned into "@Stake" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@stake). "@Stake" was acquired by Symantec in 2004.
- VonGuard 12y ago
  That was only some CDC people. Many went on to sell out in entirely normal ways. Name me one smart hacker from the 80's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich, and I'll show you a guy in jail. Hackers are worth money, lots of it, and experienced hackers, doubly. Even the ones who didn't sell out got great jobs. It's just what hackers do, now. Besides, hacker groups are dead as a cultural phenomenon. Now, they're just Internet street gangs stealing credit card info and spreading trojans, instead of spreading thought crime and information.
  - contingencies 12y ago
    Name me one smart hacker from the 80's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich, and I'll show you a guy in jail. This is a bit snipey. Plenty of us don't value cash as highly as the American culture-complex would wish us. (eg. Listened to any hip-hop recently?) Though, the majority did sell out... and pretty hard and fast, and in one direction: the US military industrial complex and its once-removed assets such as Google. (See latest Assange book if doubting...) hacker groups are dead as a cultural phenomenon Disagree. We've got more outcome-oriented collectives now, such as maker spaces and Github projects. This is arguably more to the point, and an efficiency improvement on idling on IRC for years on end.
  - lawnchair_larry 12y ago
    "Name me one smart hacker from the 80's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich" Pretty much none of them got wickedly rich. For the most part, they got a decent developer-tier salary at a tech company.
- babblingdweeb 12y ago
  The L0Pht crew produced some awesome tools as well. Anyone remember the Windows NT password decryption tool? You could do dictionary attacks or brute force (if you had the CPU power). I still have old versions of their software on some Zip disks collecting dust somewhere :)
tacc 12y ago
what is this website all about?
- privong 12y ago
  Textfiles published by long-time hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow. The wiki page has more information on the group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow
ganzuul 12y ago
If anyone has the dirt on those old SW crack sites... Please share!
NicoJuicy 12y ago
Wow, this reminds me of astalavista ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk ) where i learned a bunch of stuff back in the day... Doesn't seem to exist anymore though.
lgas 12y ago
Moo.
- bensherman 12y ago
  At some point, we flee after Joe630 demands "hugs" from us... something he continues throughout the conference. "Touch me not, boy... I will not submit to your fondling," I tell him behind clenched teeth as I back out of the room. "I'll only hug a man if he's buying me drinks or I'm trying to lift his wallet."
martin1b 12y ago
Perfect timing. Was just reminiscing on the bbs days last week and punched up the documentary 'BBS' from Jason Scott on youtube. Good times.

This file dated to 08-09-2004 is one of my favorites: http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0395.html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0395.html It's a long read, but worth it. A rather deep psychological and technical profile on how one boy grew up at the height of the BBS warez and hacking scene.

mason55 12y ago

Wow... Cult of the Dead Cow archives... Blast from the past. The Conscience of a Hacker[1] was always one of my favorites during my angsty teen years. [1] http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0012.html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0012.html

christianbryant 12y ago

I grew up in the 80s and remember my first cDc exposure in the early 90s through a co-worker who showed me how to access a command line on the work computer that was used to order books . I remember being in awe of Back Orifice and many plugins that came out back then. I never embraced that life, but I still read these with nostalgia and a bit of jealousy at the technical and mental freedom the underground enjoyed (and still does).

makmanalp 12y ago

Wow, I remember reading some of this stuff when I was younger - just checked the most recent ones. It's surprising that the tone and style is a mix of something (I perhaps a bit pretentiously feel) I grew out of over the years, and thoughtful, elegant prose. If not anything else, it's interesting reading, which is a compliment in itself these days: http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0410.html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0410.html

dunsany 12y ago

I remember seeing these guys at Defcon for the release of Back Orifice 2k. Full-on rockstars

neals 12y ago
As a 14 year old kid, I was really into that. Could you share what you saw? (Being from Europe, none of that really reached me back then )

haddr 12y ago

Back orifice! I remember that around 98-99 you could do a simple scan of some dialup networks and always find around ten machines with back orifice installed. A lot of fun for person discovering the state of security of windows machines and networks...

tacc 12y ago
I guess that did not last long.
antr 12y ago
I used to scan the users at IRC channels for BO (my mirc client had a plugin that did it automatically). I used to get into people's computers (so many were infected!) and checking the stuff they had in their drives... I know that is illegal, but back then the Internet was the Wild West. Among other things I remember seeing some very disturbing self portraits.... I think it was 98-99. The Internet was special back then.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

siberianbear 12y ago

Wow, now that is really a blast from the past. I'm a similar age to the guy who wrote that article and had a similar experience of trying to figure all this stuff out. Blue Boxes (at least where I lived) no longer worked, but black boxes and red boxes worked. I don't know when blue boxes ever worked, but I have the impression it was in the seventies, or at the latest, the early eighties. A black box was a circuit you put on your line to pick up a call without dropping the voltage on the line enough for the phone company to think you'd actually answered. So, your friend could call you long-distance (even internationally) and you could talk to them without them having to pay a long distance charge. The problem was that you could always hear the ringing every few seconds in the background and their voice was attenutated. It was fun and it kinda worked, but I didn't use it that much because it was so annoying. The red box was a device for making free phone calls from pay phones. It faked the tones you inserted for a nickel, a dime, or a quarter. You could just hold it up to the speaker of a pay phone and just hit the button. I built one off a schematic I downloaded. At most pay phones it didn't work at all, but I found two that it worked at. I'd go there and call all my friends in distant states and call them for hours. Every time the operator would come on and ask for money, I'd hold up the device to the speaker and press the "quarter" button a few times. Later I got hold of "hacking" programs for "MCI" codes and other providers. Actually, MCI was more sophisticated that most of the other providers, and quickly shut off hackers. There were a lot of other providers that weren't so smart. The way the programs worked is by dialing an 800 number, some "user ID code" and then a known modem number. If a computer answered (i.e., you got a carrier tone from a modem), you knew that the code was good. If not, you tried another code. These computer programs would just try random codes all day using a known-good modem number and then print you a list of the successful codes. As I started to learn more about this stuff, I did crazier stuff like call all over the world. In this era of Skype it's free to call all over the world, but in 1984 placing international phone calls was really expensive. But I'd call my teenage hacker friends in England and Australia and just chat with them for hours. At retail rates, I was running up a couple of thousand dollars a month in phone charges. Occasionally I'd hear of someone in my circle of friends getting busted in some way, but in my teenage naivete I figured it couldn't happen to me. When I was sixteen and got a driver's license, I met some of the hackers that were within driving distance. One of them got busted at his house: the police arrested him and took all his computer equipment. Since he was a minor he got off with a slap on the wrist, but he didn't get his computers back. I knew that my time was coming soon, since there were already some hints my phone line was being tapped by companies I was stealing from.

niix 12y ago

Amazing. I totally forgot about Cult of the Dead Cow. I remember reading articles on here when I was younger. Edit: Just found this in the apps section `08-01-1998 - "Back Orifice" by Sir Dystic` - so awesome!

saganus 12y ago
Back Orifice was an awesome tool. Very fun to play pranks on less knowledgeable friends. I even remember starting to learn Delphi 3 because I met a guy that did a similar tool called Hacker's Paradise, but was later renamed to Admin's Paradise I believe, as he realized this could be used for and sold to admins. He was kind enough to send me the source code and give me a few tips here and there, and man, Object Oriented programming was so hard for me at the time

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hadoukenio 12y ago

Not sure why cDc is on the front page on HN right now, but along the same vein, here's PLA (Phone Losers of America) and it looks like he's still going strong (even has a YouTube channel): http://www.phonelosers.org/

spiritplumber 12y ago

We actually used Back Orifice as a VNC solution for remote assistance.... I forget what we did to make it so it wouldn't cause outside people to poke our remote stations - changed the port number via hex editing, IIRC. The nineties were fun.

giancarlostoro 12y ago
I did something similar with a friend, it was easier than having him figure out how to configure VNC. Sometimes a "Trojan" is the solution.

cocoflunchy 12y ago

Randomly browsing the archives... "Ebola - Disease of the Year" - Aug 1996 http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/1996/08/ebola---disease.html http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/1996/08/ebola---disease.html

Animats 12y ago

And then they sold out. CdD turned into "L0PHT Heavy Industries" (http://www.l0pht.com/ http://www.l0pht.com/), a computer security firm. That turned into "@Stake" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@stake). "@Stake" was acquired by Symantec in 2004.

VonGuard 12y ago
That was only some CDC people. Many went on to sell out in entirely normal ways. Name me one smart hacker from the 80's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich, and I'll show you a guy in jail. Hackers are worth money, lots of it, and experienced hackers, doubly. Even the ones who didn't sell out got great jobs. It's just what hackers do, now. Besides, hacker groups are dead as a cultural phenomenon. Now, they're just Internet street gangs stealing credit card info and spreading trojans, instead of spreading thought crime and information.
- contingencies 12y ago
  Name me one smart hacker from the 80's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich, and I'll show you a guy in jail. This is a bit snipey. Plenty of us don't value cash as highly as the American culture-complex would wish us. (eg. Listened to any hip-hop recently?) Though, the majority did sell out... and pretty hard and fast, and in one direction: the US military industrial complex and its once-removed assets such as Google. (See latest Assange book if doubting...) hacker groups are dead as a cultural phenomenon Disagree. We've got more outcome-oriented collectives now, such as maker spaces and Github projects. This is arguably more to the point, and an efficiency improvement on idling on IRC for years on end.
- lawnchair_larry 12y ago
  "Name me one smart hacker from the 80's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich" Pretty much none of them got wickedly rich. For the most part, they got a decent developer-tier salary at a tech company.
babblingdweeb 12y ago
The L0Pht crew produced some awesome tools as well. Anyone remember the Windows NT password decryption tool? You could do dictionary attacks or brute force (if you had the CPU power). I still have old versions of their software on some Zip disks collecting dust somewhere :)

tacc 12y ago

what is this website all about?

privong 12y ago
Textfiles published by long-time hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow. The wiki page has more information on the group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow

ganzuul 12y ago

If anyone has the dirt on those old SW crack sites... Please share!

NicoJuicy 12y ago

Wow, this reminds me of astalavista ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk ) where i learned a bunch of stuff back in the day... Doesn't seem to exist anymore though.

lgas 12y ago

Moo.

bensherman 12y ago
At some point, we flee after Joe630 demands "hugs" from us... something he continues throughout the conference. "Touch me not, boy... I will not submit to your fondling," I tell him behind clenched teeth as I back out of the room. "I'll only hug a man if he's buying me drinks or I'm trying to lift his wallet."

martin1b 12y ago

Perfect timing. Was just reminiscing on the bbs days last week and punched up the documentary 'BBS' from Jason Scott on youtube. Good times.