
‘We Got to Be Cool About This‘: An Oral History of the LØpht, Part 1 - signa11
https://duo.com/decipher/an-oral-history-of-the-l0pht
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madmax108
Man, this whole series is so well written. I remember back in the day, when
lophtcrack, Medusa, Cain and Abel, and JackTheRipper along with massive (for
the time) rainbow tables were the tools of the trade (This was a little before
internet exploits and Metasploit gained popularity). As a little script-
kiddie, finding and running exploits on unsecured servers and machines, doing
silly things like ARP poisoning in my high school lab network and bruteforcing
zip files with passwords, oh such glorious times. I truly went from being a
user of tech to a person with a hacker mindset, which has proved to be
tremendously useful in my professional career.

I honestly feel that in the current day and age, if anyone tried the same
stuff many of us got away with in the early 2000s (or 90s), then the
punishment would be much much stricter. Not sure how that gets in the way of
people learning by "banging things together till they work", which was a major
source of learning for me.

Damn, I feel old now!

~~~
jraines
> _I honestly feel that in the current day and age, if anyone tried the same
> stuff many of us got away with in the early 2000s (or 90s), then the
> punishment would be much much stricter._

From poring over stuff from this milieu, I figured out how I could change
grade records at my school. I never did it, so I don't know what would've
happened if I got busted.

Some kid in the Bay Area just got busted for the same and is facing 14 felony
charges.

Anyway. This was my first encounter with hacker culture, and it was so brain
expanding even though I understood practically none of it. Now, I could barely
recount more than the few sentences I just did, but that logo brings up waves
of nostalgia.

~~~
some_account
Because the American legal system is insane.

~~~
peterwwillis
Yep. Teenagers who commit benign hacks for fun get more time than murderers.
People's lives get ruined for effectively the digital form of trespass. It's
pretty fucked up.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Do you have a source for people getting more time than murderers for
"effectively the digital form of trespass". I agree that some parts of the
legal system do not work very well, but I think that's a big exaggeration.

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dec0dedab0de
As a kid l0pht was this mythical force, along with cDc. I would read a bunch
of papers, not understanding any of it, but I thought it was so cool. I
remember being very disappointed when the domain redirected to @stake.

~~~
tptacek
They're generally cool people, but they're just people. The Cult of the Dead
Cow people especially --- I have nothing bad to say about any of them, but if
you're idolizing them, ask yourself why you don't just become one of them.
They're just a group of people who wrote tfiles, shared bulletin board
systems, and had varying levels of engagement with computer security.
Virtually every serious software security person who blogs is clearing a
higher bar than they set.

The one thing everyone involved with the L0pht and cDc has that you probably
don't is age; they were doing this stuff in the 1990s and had time to make a
name for themselves. But things move so much faster now than they did in the
1990s, that differentiator gets less and less forbidding every day.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I understand that now, but when I was 14 in 1996 it seemed like I was reading
about some forbidden secret magic. Now it just feels like a different career
path. I'm sure a good part of that change is me getting older, and knowing
more. Though I think that the rising level of professionalism in computer
security has robbed it of it's mystique. I think this is a good thing overall,
but nostalgia and what not.

~~~
georgemcbay
> I think that the rising level of professionalism in computer security has
> robbed it of it's mystique

It has, though basically every one of the now-respectable-looking professional
security outfits you could point to has one or more of these late 80s early
90s "mystique era" hackers working for it (and I can probably tell you what
their old bbs handle and/or irc nick was).

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mdb333
great article but it kind of petered off at the end... why not highlight what
folks have gone on to do post @stake?

they got acquired by Symantec. Mudge went on to work with the DoD to
development a cyber fasttrack program, Weld started and recently sold
Veracode, Katie started the bug bounty at Microsoft, Joe Grand is still doing
his thing w/ HW etc...

these folks really are self-made titans of the industry and a true testament
to meritocracy and the hacker ethos. They legitamized security research as we
know it.

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jameskegel
I’d like to also remember SpaceR0gue’s now gone HNNCast with great segments
like “tool time” and “con fu”

