The Fifteen Greatest Hacking Exploits

[boonality]

I was a teenager in the mid 90's and frequently used those stupid AOL tools that gave you the wavy text and **** to boot people offline from chat rooms lol. Fun times back then. I look back on it and think about how stupid that actually was. I wish I knew more about security but the limited knowledge I do have has lead me to slightly higher administration overhead but I have a deny all rule on my little linksys firewall router thing and only allow web/games/ windows update, the ports that msn and aol messenger use, and stuff like that.

 

[razor512]

Some guy got expelled from my old high school for finding out the password for the admin account. Overreaction?

thats dumb, has a school ever used a good password

they want something thats easy to remember which is 99% of the time a pass that a dictionary attack will only take 1-2 seconds to get through


who ever hacks to cause damage is a jerk. the people who do it for good things are the ones that made the internet as good as it is today.

with out hackers and crackers, the large companies would have a complete monopoly over the internet, just like how almost 100% of the wireless spectrum is owned by large companies, (before home users could freely use some of it, now companies own it and sell usage of it so us when it used to be free)

companies are trying this with the internet also. if it was not for a few who round ways around those limitations, we would only be able to go on website owned by large companies

as shown in the article, most hackers do a a good service to everyone around the world
like removing apples DRM

apple uses drm because when you spend a crap load of money on music, it will only work on their crap so suppose another company made a better mp3 player, you wouldn't be able to get it because none of your music will work on it and you wont want to repurchase all of your music again

hackers are what keep large companies in check and keeps them from completely ruining everything from us.

if there were no hackers or crackers, software will be a lot more limited
bus since there around, many companies think twice about screwing people over

because they know the consumers have an option
if they drm the hell out of their stuff, people will just download a cracked drm free copy

if that option was never available, companies will drm the hell out of everything so if you purchase something from them, your caught in their claws for ever

 

[mtyermom]

Loved the article, but why is this in the general homebuilt section?

 

[BeAuMaN]

Good read. I have never been interested in hacking, but it is nice to see what people have tried in the past.

I concentrate more on keeping my companies internal network out of harms way(double hardware firewall, double black hole DMZ with ghost nodes, SSID spoofer with over 200 ghost SSID across my wireless network ect....).

I would be curious to see how fast an experienced hacker could get into my network, but then again, it might scare me

As we all know... Social Engineering is golden... probably one of the cheapest security measures is pulling your endusers into a conference room and educating them on how -you- will contact them, if at all, for service (However, if you have a building with less than 100 endusers, likely you'll be doing everything via remote desktop or going to their computer manually without using them). That way, if anyone uses social engineering, you'll know they're an outsider and not someone with inside knowledge 😉. However, doing it the real technical way would be a challenge... though Wireless is one of those nasty things that some of it will always be out of your control if you get a zero-day exploit going (Check the exploits last DefCon). Your users are -always- connecting via a tunnel, right? If they aren't, the data -they're- sending is open for catching if someone was patient enough to go through all the "clients".

That's just a guestimate at a glance though. Wish ya best in protecting your network!

 

[bgd73]

That is a good article but it does, however, only focus on the the people that were busted and got a lot of media attention. There is a huge wealth of happenings in the security arena both good and bad.

that is the scariest part of all. I was victim to a money heist (small time) and it involved my identity somewhere else. I dug into this on my own and learned with a shock that even tcp/ip verson 4 (the net as we know it) is deeply flawed. "firewalls are absurd, but for basic things" <- and I am not even hacker.That is what I concluded.
I did try out a few things, that involved spoofing between two of my own computers (at the time almost 10 years go) I was fascinated. To this day, I do not know what keeps me secure and I wonder constantly...every purchase. TCP ip v6 seems real quiet lately, I wonder where that stands today...
My worries subsided the second win2k sparked up for me when it came out. I even let my linux redhat 7 go...Seems ancient history, I may have even read this story posted already someplace. (my net is that bad with repeats, another reason I dug at the whole concept).
Anyhoo...great story, even if I may have read similar, it is always interesting reminders.
Most hackers aren't bad, the notoriety brings change. The seeking mental help for computer dependency and other pc related stuff is not all bad...

 

[garydale]

I thought the term was "cracking" for illegal stuff.

It is. The author got his terms backwards. Hacking is the digging into the innards out of curiosity. Cracking is breaking into systems. Makes you wonder how much else the author got wrong.

I notice that he seems to support DRM, which violates the Fair Use provisions of most copyright systems. All of which leads to the larger issue of whether our laws should be there to protect corporations or citizens. With technology having a lifespan of a few years, DRM on music means that you have to repurchase your music collection every few years. And on DVDs it means you can't move out of your region (e.g. don't move from North America to Europe or vice-versa).

It's interesting to note than no criminal charges were ever laid in the biggest cracking scam ever devised - the Sony Rootkit exploit - where millions of CDs were distributed with code that gave Sony administrator access to your Windows computer. Why isn't Sony listed in this article?

 

[mgc8]

The author got his terms backwards. Hacking is the digging into the innards out of curiosity. Cracking is breaking into systems. Makes you wonder how much else the author got wrong

I was just going to notice the same thing, plus the fact that the author places in the same category people who "crack" for financial gain and cause real damage and those that "hack" retarded things like DRM to help people exercise their freedom and rights.

Also, the mere idea that a computer crime, no matter the magnitude (as long as it does not involve human death or injury) can be punished by a 70-year sentence is simply appaling. How much do they get for rape?...

 

[nachowarrior]

drm deserves to be hacked. There needs to be a way around it. These companies just keep dumping more and more money into it and there's always a few people who are willing to crack it in a weeks time or less just to prove to them that drm is retarded. Waste of money if you ask me. And I honestly don't understand how they get off punishing hackers (not in all cases, but most of them).... without them they would never know how insecure their data really is... so in all honesty, it's people like this that keep security tech moving forward and keep simpletons like the masses out of their cache of private data. This is why most hackers are employed as security pro's... it's like a resume.. if you didn't go to prison you can't get a job. 😛 An admittedly unconventional way to build your resume, but it appears to be the most effective in the tech field today. Nothing else really gets any one given person this much media attention... and you can't buy or study for that. Either way all of these activities are a means to an end. So some "money" is lost in the end... but make not that the article always states that the companies themselves state how much the loss was, and not a third party. 😛

 

[nachowarrior]

note**

 

[Shadow703793]

drm deserves to be hacked. There needs to be a way around it. These companies just keep dumping more and more money into it and there's always a few people who are willing to crack it in a weeks time or less just to prove to them that drm is retarded. Waste of money if you ask me. And I honestly don't understand how they get off punishing hackers (not in all cases, but most of them).... without them they would never know how insecure their data really is... so in all honesty, it's people like this that keep security tech moving forward and keep simpletons like the masses out of their cache of private data. This is why most hackers are employed as security pro's... it's like a resume.. if you didn't go to prison you can't get a job. 😛 An admittedly unconventional way to build your resume, but it appears to be the most effective in the tech field today. Nothing else really gets any one given person this much media attention... and you can't buy or study for that. Either way all of these activities are a means to an end. So some "money" is lost in the end... but make not that the article always states that the companies themselves state how much the loss was, and not a third party. 😛

Agreed.

 

[razor512]

drm causes hackers to spring up and piracy to increase

when a user downloads his favorite song from itunes and finds that it doesnt work in his mp3 player or favorite music

when what he/she might do research into why it wont work, then they will find that the drm is causing the problem, then they will use their favorite p2 program to just download all of their music



if you went to a mall and there were 2 music stores next to each other
store 1 sells each song for $1, the song will only play in 1 device or program and nothing else

store 2: sells each song for free and the music plays in any device and program

which would you do?


drm is useless when it lowers the value of the software.

also drm is not always a result of piracy.

most drm comes out because the greedy company workers will discover that, oh, users can copy our stuff if they did this, lets make DRM to block it before they discover it (not thinking that, this drm will annoy everyone and they will start looking for a way around it, and the easiest way around it is piracy)

 

[coletrx]

Reading some of these stories, and getting a laugh.. here is one of mine.

At high school, our IT teacher used to have big glasses and couldn't even really see with them on. Back then the school only had a super fast single dial up account. So when he used to log in, my brother hovered around in the background. He did then whole, hunch over the keyboard 2cm away and press 1 key slowly with the index finger, raise his head the the screen 2cm away to see the *, then back to the keyboard and repeat. Once we had the password we used the schools account after hours for a full year! I guess security at that level was more lax in those days.

 

[jzkgeq]

I can't believe that this one didn't make it in:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/jul07/5280

Whilst there's no definitive name that can be associated to it, this was a pretty amazing hack!