Computer hacker stories?

[iggypop]

Yo guys Im doing an assignment for school and need some personal horror stories of computer hacking, virus's or data loss. If you guys have any horror stories of losing all your baby pic's and your wife freaking out, or mabye you downloaded that "certain" movie and had a virus destroy your comp, Id love to hear about it! TIA

And yes I heard about the dude that whipped out 38 mil, so lets hear your stories!

[BlackArcher101]

Do you want computer hacker stories or just computer stories?

[Phaneuf3]

this one time.... i hacked the gibson.

[getbak]

I hacked 127.0.0.1

[arsenal]

At the risk of de-railing this thread, just a clarification:
Computer Hacking != Virus, Cracking, Phreaking or any other activity that invovles data loss, or illegal activity.

Hacking in a philosphical sense is figuring out how something works, and can be applied to more than just computers and software.

Back on topic, no, no stories from me.

To Phaneuf3.. I have to save your a$$, with my help, we can do it 5 minutes

[iggypop]

Haha you guys are so helpful! I wouldn't expect anything less.
BlackArcher to answer your question, hes looking for stories on:

-Crackers
-Viruses, Worms, and Trojans
-Spyware, Adware, and Hijackers
-Accidental Data Loss
-Fudging Reality - Hoaxes and Digital Un-truths

[STeeLy]

A long time ago I had a virus that completely destroyed my D drive... luckily... that was my game drive... which I had CD's for... I formatted and reinstalled windows.

[BlackArcher101]

Ok, here's a story.

I had decided to take the plunge and install Vista. Since I had XP Pro previously I bought the Vista Home Premium edition. According to microsoft, a clean install is recommended. As well, my hard drive space was nearly used up, so I decided to add another 250 gb SATA II drive. I already had 1-SATA II drive and 2-ATA133 drives. Plus the optical drives as well.

So to start, I wanted to install Vista on a partition on the new drive. I installed and and during the process rearranged the inside of my pc, ie moved hard drives to different slots. While doing so, I must have exchanged the 2 ATA 133 drives between master & slave.

Now, it's been at least a year since I reformatted or install an OS, so don't laugh too hard eh?
So I go to install Vista and boot from the DVD. DVD finds only the two SATA drives, so I say no worry, I'll just keep installing. The new SATA drive was lettered J:, and the existing SATA (with XP still on it, ya, I know), was lettered C:. But wait, what's this? Vista won't accept my XP Pro key since this edition of Vista is an upgrade... excuse me? Fine... so I install XP Pro on the J drive, thinking I can change it to C latter on.... oh how I was wrong (I really really thought I could as some point in the past).

XP Pro installed... still only the same drives showing in windows.... strange. I left it to some motherboard drivers not being installed yet (had that problem before). So I throw in the Vista dvd and upgrade from within windows. Install goes fine, reboot, and still no drives. Oh , can't switch J: to C: even after I change the existing C: drive. %@#!.

Finally realize that I must have messed up the existing drive connections. So before I reinstall windows in order to get it on C:, I decide to fix the other drives. 20 reboots later and as many curses, I finally get the drives to show up in Device Manager. But wait... even thought it says they are working, they aren't in My Computer. I open up Disk Management... and voila... It's saying "Not Initialized" for the 2 disks. So I try Initializing them, thinking they would work. Keep in mind these were my 2 storage disks. Nope, that didn't work as they don't have a drive letter now. Fine, I'll give them one. Uh oh... now they say all space is unallocated. Well $@^# me.
So having at least solved the problem of the drives being recognized, I turn off the pc, disconnect all drives except the new one (keeping note of the cables), and installing vista on C: this time. Yay, finally. Reboot and the other drives are still showing as all space unallocated (ie no partition), but yet have drive letters. Since they stored all my digital photos since 2003 and my songs/movies etc adding up to 400 GB, I didn't want to risk formatting them.

I spent 2 solid days (a Saturday and Sunday) recovering files on the drives and moving them to the SATA drives so I could format. At least the files still had filenames... unlike a time before . Get that done, move everything back, and finally, what feels like 4 days later (oh wait, it was 4)... the pc is finally running and operational. Sort of... this is still Vista were talking about, so it will never be 100% operational for a while.

There, how's that?


Then there's the stories in the late 90's when back door trojans were the best trick to pull on someone. Ah Netbus and Back Orifice... how you never failed me. Played many a tricks on classmates, teachers, and family. Then they started to be recognized by virus agents... damn.

[Bobblehead]

First virus I ever had on a system was the "Stoned Empire Monkey" virus.

Not sure where it came from, probably a file from a BBS. That lead to my first use of A/V software - McAffee. The whole thing fit on a floppy. Ran it, it cleaned off the virus, and that was the last time a system of mine was actually infected. Although there have been periods when my incoming mail checker has gotten one heck of a workout (stupid relatives).

[mykalberta]

Here is a fairly recent event.

I run a VNC over SSH server at my home so I can remote into, I also run an SFTP Network useage.

If any of you are hackers and are looking for a few script kiddies to go after:

61.250.163.11 and 71.166.159.154 were the two IP's

It was hilarious looking at the log file, attempting to log on using usernames admin, acctexec, powerusr, superusr, lclroot etc and the passwords were crazy (I log all packet transfers that go through my network not on port 80 or port XXXX (ephermeril port I choose for personal use).

I have those IP's logged incase they try again -they will get a little MYK surprise.

MYK

[Prototype]

I turned on my computer today... that's the extent of my !337 haXorz skillz.

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by iggypop

-Fudging Reality - Hoaxes and Digital Un-truths

I don't really have any stories about viruses, but as far as hoaxes and such... I was working for a large multinational corporation, and one morning, this email about 'free trips to disneyland, send to everyone you know' starts making the rounds. This was back in the mid 90's, when everyone had email but there wasn't a high degree of computer literacy. But people start sending this to everyone in their departments, and I personally received it from about 30 different people that morning. Of course, there were some people who realized that this was a hoax, and starting emailing everyone in their department to tell them not to forward the message. I received about another 10 emails to that effect. By mid-afternoon, the entire company-wide email system had been overloaded and ground to a halt. A few years later I was talking to an IT guy about this, and he said that the volume of emails sent per-capita that day was far beyond any other single day the company has experienced. Just completely overwhelmed their system. And it had nothing to do with a virus, just a lot of gullible people.

[mykalberta]

Originally Posted by octothorp

I don't really have any stories about viruses, but as far as hoaxes and such... I was working for a large multinational corporation, and one morning, this email about 'free trips to disneyland, send to everyone you know' starts making the rounds. This was back in the mid 90's, when everyone had email but there wasn't a high degree of computer literacy. But people start sending this to everyone in their departments, and I personally received it from about 30 different people that morning. Of course, there were some people who realized that this was a hoax, and starting emailing everyone in their department to tell them not to forward the message. I received about another 10 emails to that effect. By mid-afternoon, the entire company-wide email system had been overloaded and ground to a halt. A few years later I was talking to an IT guy about this, and he said that the volume of emails sent per-capita that day was far beyond any other single day the company has experienced. Just completely overwhelmed their system. And it had nothing to do with a virus, just a lot of gullible people.

There still isnt a high degree.

Back when Katrina hit someone sent out an email (basically a sob thing) and so people reply, but they dont reply to the sender but to everyone soe basically about 250 people sent an email to everyone in the company within 5 minutes, yah that killed the Exchange server.

Comp users who dont know better are normally far worse than an external malicaious hacker. I have been with this company for a few years now and that stuff is far worse than hackers. The only "hackers" we have had per say are certain sites where someoen has started a torrent shop and those sites are down, nothing major though. I dont work for anyone too big, under 7K employees so we arent that big of a target.

On average we get about 38 different hits on the external link in Canada, mosrly people testing ports and the like, most are from Germany, some Korea, China is very rare although the Korean machines may be being used as bots - who knows.

Last month a few from the same C subnet in Korea got into the DMZ but the dummy machine tied them up for over a day (virtual domain setup so they probably thought that they were actually accessing servers and the like.

MYK

[droopydrew19]

This one time I hacked into a really cool game site called W.O.P.R

That AI really played a mean game of chess.

Then it started shooting missles off all over the place so I was forced to shut it down by making it play tick-tack-toe against itself.

[worth]

VNC can be a lot of fun at work.

[SpitFire40]

I have hacked a neighbors wireless connection that wasn't secure because it kept interfering with mine. I put in a password and locked that bitch tight and disabled it's wireless broadcast ability.

It takes a simple pen reset though but it gave me a good 2 weeks of interference free surfing time Plus I tought him a lesson to not leave his connection open.

[iggypop]

Originally Posted by SpitFire40

I have hacked a neighbors wireless connection that wasn't secure because it kept interfering with mine. I put in a password and locked that bitch tight and disabled it's wireless broadcast ability.

It takes a simple pen reset though but it gave me a good 2 weeks of interference free surfing time Plus I tought him a lesson to not leave his connection open.

Haha thats the best one yet! Thanks for all the responses guys, keep it coming if you have anything else.

[Ford Prefect]

I've used a Mac for the last 17 years, so viruses and such haven't been much of an issue. I've only had one in that time ... I can't remember what it was exactly. Might have been a trojan horse. The interesting part is that I got it from a demo disk that shipped with a copy of a Mac magazine ... MacWorld I think. I've never used any kind of anti-virus sofoware (why bother with Macs) and I've only had one incident in 17 years and I got it from a commercial disk ... figures eh?

[Prototype]

Originally Posted by droopydrew19

This one time I hacked into a really cool game site called W.O.P.R

That AI really played a mean game of chess.

Then it started shooting missles off all over the place so I was forced to shut it down by making it play tick-tack-toe against itself.

Did you also get a day off a few years later where you caught a foul ball at Wrigley, start an out of nowhere dance rutine in the middle of a parade, manage to crash you bestfriend's classic car, and still make it look like you took a sick day from school?

How is Cameron BTW... tell him I like his Howe jersey...

/classic Drew!

[Sparks]

Posted by Bobblehead:
First virus I ever had on a system was the "Stoned Empire Monkey" virus.

That damn Monkey virus was the first and only virus I've ever gotten on my computer, that I know of. That would have been in the early 90s.

That virus was a huge pain in the ass, too. It just kept on coming back, because it was on all my disks.