
Cult of the Dead Cow Publications - christianbryant
http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/texXxt.html
======
vezzy-fnord
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.

------
haddr
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...

~~~
antr
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.

------
mason55
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)

------
niix
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
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

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

~~~
neals
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 )

------
hadoukenio
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/

------
cocoflunchy
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)

------
siberianbear
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.

~~~
MichaelGG
You can do some fun stuff with SIP and the hacked up VoIP networks today. I
found at least one Asterisk-based company followed 302 redirects, but didn't
update the CDRs. So I could forward my phone to an expensive destination, but
only hey charged for a few seconds of incoming call to my phone. An
enterprising user exploited this to offer free calling to Haiti to a bunch of
customers. Oops. SIP is convoluted from the parsing on up, so there's plenty
of space for interesting behavior to hide. Not to mention the interactions
resulting from lots of custom platform code interacting with what's
traditionally considered s closed network, written by people that still have
that mindset...

Of course, the stakes are higher, now. It's not hard to earn $0.30+ per minute
per channel. In a day, you can earn $30k just compromising one little box and
10Mbps of bandwidth.

But it just doesn't have the same mystique and feel as old phreaking. Plus
since it's just often computer hacking and fraud, and these days people are
more sensitive about all that, it even feels more criminal.

~~~
sedachv
> Of course, the stakes are higher, now. It's not hard to earn $0.30+ per
> minute per channel. In a day, you can earn $30k just compromising one little
> box and 10Mbps of bandwidth.

Is that from premium number dialing or something else?

~~~
MichaelGG
With a premium number you can get the money directly. Just get a premium
number and pump calls to it. But there are other legitimate destinations that
are rather expensive. So you could setup shop and proxy calls to hacked boxes.
But then you've gotta get customers, accept payments from them, etc. - sounds
like more work.

~~~
sedachv
> But there are other legitimate destinations that are rather expensive.

What would those be today? I can't see how long-distance reselling could be
worth it anymore.

------
NicoJuicy
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.

------
spiritplumber
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
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.

------
makmanalp
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)

------
christianbryant
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).

------
Animats
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
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
_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.

------
martin1b
Perfect timing. Was just reminiscing on the bbs days last week and punched up
the documentary 'BBS' from Jason Scott on youtube.

Good times.

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

------
tacc
what is this website all about?

~~~
privong
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)

------
lgas
Moo.

~~~
bensherman
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."

