
Phrack Magazine (1985-2016) - turrini
http://www.phrack.org/
======
loydb
Randy and Craig (Taran King and Knight Lightning) did an amazing job with
Phrack. It was an honor to write for them, and I almost never see them
mentioned when people talk about the zine. The zine, and the St. Louis
Summercons, were hugely influential. I'm still friends with a bunch of folks
from that scene.

If it weren't for a timely late night phone call from Craig needing some more
content for an issue, the Conscience of a Hacker would probably not have been
written.

~~~
xtracto
Howdy crap The Mentor itself... your Hacker Manifesto marked me as a kid in
the 80s. It gave meaning to my life growing in a remote Mexican city where few
people understood about computers.

Thank you :)

~~~
figers
Agreed, same here, the Hacker Manifesto was amazing to read as a kid diving
into computers, hacking and Phreaking...

------
veeceecee
All this BBS talk takes me back to about 10 years ago, when I had a business
encounter with a consultant engineer from IBM in Chicago. After our business
meeting, we went to lunch and this gentleman dropped me off at my place of
work in his car (IIRC, it was a Toyota Avalon with white leather interior). We
had some small talk during the short drive - about some of my pet projects at
the time and what I was doing outside of work, etc. He was very encouraging
and appeared very curious. I appreciated that.

Little did I know at the time that I was in the presence of greatness and
driving with a legend. He was Ward Christensen. I was so totally ignorant of
his awesomeness that I'm ashamed. And so embarrassed now thinking about how
vain I was talking to him about my barely getting my feet wet with Android
application development. :$

That was my only encounter with Ward. I think I connected the dots a few
months later when I read about him in 2600. (@Ward - If you are reading this,
hi!! And my apologies for my ignorance).

~~~
dpwm
> I was so totally ignorant of his awesomeness that I'm ashamed.

I would speculate it's likely it made for a much more interesting conversation
for both of you than if you had been aware of his accomplishments. You also
got a much more interesting anecdote as a result of that.

FWIW I hadn't heard of him until your comment. I suspect for every one person
I have heard of there's at least a hundred I haven't heard of whose
accomplishments are no less great.

Unless you are a narcissist, it must really suck to be so famous that you can
never have a conversation with anybody in a symmetric fashion.

~~~
TomVDB
In my college days, I often hitchhiked to places instead of taking the train.
It was just more fun to talk to people of various kinds.

One day on my way back from a trade show about the future of technology
(1992?), I get picked up by this chain smoking hippy guy in an old beat up
Ford Escort.

We had a pleasant conversation. And then it suddenly hit me that I was talking
to a famous (in my country) radio comedian.

And that’s where the conversation stopped.

It was exactly as you described: I just felt embarrassed talking about mundane
stuff like the full color flat LCD panels that were so cool.

What do you say to somebody like that?

------
e19293001
After reading the "smashing the stack for fun and profit", I got interested in
reverse engineering. The most fun tutorial was from lena151[0]. ARTeam had
published several papers for beginners and advanced reverse engineers. Deroko
who was a member of the ARTeam had published an article about PEB hooking[2]
and was sited from phrack[1]. I miss hacking and reverse engineering. I would
like to go back to those times if time would allow me to do so. Sometimes, I
end up reading this article[3] again and again.

[0] -
[https://tuts4you.com/e107_plugins/download/download.php?list...](https://tuts4you.com/e107_plugins/download/download.php?list.17)

[1] -
[http://www.phrack.org/issues/65/10.html](http://www.phrack.org/issues/65/10.html)

[2] - [https://www.exploit-
db.com/ezines/kr5hou2zh4qtebqk.onion/ART...](https://www.exploit-
db.com/ezines/kr5hou2zh4qtebqk.onion/ARTeam/ARTeam.Ezine.Number2.pdf)

[3] - [http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html](http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html)

------
fouc
e-zines that were transmitted over dial up modems via BBSes back in the days
before WWW took off seemed so deliciously subversive.

One night I came across an e-zine that shared a BBS phone number for my city.
I made several attempts before giving up. An hour later cops showed up at my
door. It turned out I was phoning a secondary number for 911. I got pranked
pretty good!

------
jdp23
Much of the early work on buffer overrun exploitation was published in Phrack.
The article Brandon Baker and I did for IEEE Security and Privacy had a
sidebar on "Nontraditional literature on buffer overruns" that's got some
greatest hits like AlephOne’s Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit from 1996
[1] and The Advanced return-into-lib(c) Exploits from 2001 [2]. Over the
years, a surprising number of people have told me that this was their favorite
part of the article!

[1]
[https://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=49&a=14](https://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=49&a=14)

[2]
[https://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=58&a=4](https://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=58&a=4)

~~~
nigifabio
Is there a today equivalent ?

~~~
jor-el
Personally for me PoC||GTFO fills up the void. They have some good articles
and explaining in very friendly way.

[0]
[https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/](https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/)

~~~
emptybits
Indeed! Reading those issues, for me, is a stream of shock and awe but always
learning because the contributors generally give sufficient instructions to
perform/confirm their achievements yourself.

Example ... about halfway through Issue 0x02 it is casually mentioned, _" You
will find by running ‘qemu-system-i386 -fda pocorgtfo02.pdf’ that the PDF file
you are reading is also a bootable disk image."_ o_O !

------
greguu
Memories come back of the time when Phrack Magazine and digital copies of The
Anarchist Cookbook were shared via IPXCOPY.EXE or floppies at 10Base2 LAN
parties or other scene gatherings. Interesting ISDN hacks and also ntpwc.c and
other things were published in Phrack back then. It's almost like looking at a
vintage car magazine now.

------
tezzer
The "Paper Feed" section has 2 articles from 2018 and 2 from 2017. The most
recent, "20 Years of Escaping the Java Sandbox" [1] is exactly what 16 year
old me loved about phrack back in the day.

[1]
[http://www.phrack.org/papers/escaping_the_java_sandbox.html](http://www.phrack.org/papers/escaping_the_java_sandbox.html)

------
amenghra
try this:

    
    
      1. clone https://github.com/fdiskyou/Zines
      2. go offline for a week
      (or longer) and enjoy the read!

~~~
nyounker
WARNING DO NOT DOWNLOAD: FILES INCLUDED IN ZIP FILES!

FILE HIT LIST: {HEX}perl.ircbot.Arabhack.47 : /home/$USER/Zines/ZF0/zf0 4.txt
{HEX}php.cmdshell.avi.209 : /home/$USER/Zines/ZF0/zf0 5.txt
{CAV}Win.Worm.SomeFool-32 : /home/$USER/Zines/h0no/h0no.txt
{HEX}php.pktflood.oey.671 : /home/$USER/Zines/owned and exposed/2.txt
{YARA}php_backdoor_php : /home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-3.zip {CAV}Win.Trojan.U-83
: /home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-5.zip {CAV}Win.Trojan.Flatei-3 :
/home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-7fe.zip {CAV}Win.Trojan.P98M-1 :
/home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-4s.zip {CAV}Win.Worm.rb2-1 :
/home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-8.zip {CAV}Win.Trojan.VirTools-1 :
/home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-1.zip {CAV}Win.Trojan.Flatei-3 :
/home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-7.zip {CAV}Win.Trojan.U-78 :
/home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-6.zip {CAV}Win.Trojan.VirTools-2 :
/home/$USER/Zines/29a/29a-2.zip {YARA}telnet_cgi :
/home/$USER/Zines/uninformed/3.6.txt {CAV}Win.Trojan.Rootkit-133 :
/home/$USER/Zines/uninformed/code.3.6.tgz {CAV}Win.Downloader.51998-1 :
/home/$USER/Zines/phrack/65/10.txt {HEX}exp.linux.setuid.6 :
/home/$USER/Zines/phrack/61/3.txt {HEX}php.malware.magento.578 :
/home/$USER/Zines/phrack/62/6.txt {CAV}Html.Trojan.Shellcode-19 :
/home/$USER/Zines/HITB/HITB-Ezine-Issue-001.pdf
===============================================

~~~
wfn
Well yes, the zines will have a bunch of shellcode and command shell scripts
and (from the looks of it) code of some trojans and the like. This will get
flagged by AVs, etc.; but that's to be expected, really. :)

~~~
myself248
X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Makes for a splendid email sig.

~~~
ryanlol
Is it because nothing will ever detect it in an email signature?

If you want excellent detection rates, you might consider this string: <script
type="text/javascript"
src="[http://web.nba1001.net:8888/tj/tongji.js"></script>](http://web.nba1001.net:8888/tj/tongji.js"></script>)

Lots of AVs will detect this even if you put the string into an image file.

------
mindcrime
While we're talking "old skool" hackerdom, does anybody know/remember Voyager,
of the "Hacker's Haven" BBS? I spent so many hours on that site back in the
mid to late 90's, making the long-distance dial-up call by beige-boxing off a
COCOT phone in a gas-station parking lot, in the wee hours of the night,
hoping no cops would pull up and wonder what was going on with the super-long
phone cable running from my car to the payphone.

For anybody who wasn't around back then, a "beige box" wasn't actually a "box"
involving tone generation like a blue box or a red box. It just meant clipping
onto the red and green wires in the demarc box and connecting to an RJ-14 plug
to plug into a phone. It worked well with COCOT's (Customer Owned Coin
Operated Telephones) because the phone line for a COCOT was just a regular
line that you could make long distance calls on. The mechanism that made it a
pay-phone was all contained inside the phone itself, as opposed to a
"telephone company payphone" where the actual line itself was special. Thos
were the ones you could use a red-box on, to simulate dropping quarters into
the phone.

------
rashthedude
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you
can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike!

~~~
loydb
:)

------
walrus01
That's amazing people thought it would be a good idea to send MS Word .doc
files to phrack.

------
eb0la
I remember reading SET (Saqueadores Edicion Tecnica) in Spanish alonside with
Prack while in college.

Just found out they also have a website. Enjoy it: [http://www.set-
ezine.org/](http://www.set-ezine.org/)

~~~
misiogames
mama mia, que recuerdos! gracias por el link!

------
h0h0h0
Read this all the time as a kid. This was the best. Thanks for making my life
in the middle of nowhere infinitely more interesting. You showed me what
technology really was.

------
robarr
many moons ago, i was able to escape the restricted shell of the first
internet provider in my country, type the magical incantation cat etc/passwd
and watch the file scroll on my screen. Then panic, exit the shell, make some
dumb gopher search for my class. Never felt so alive until i ... for the first
time with my girlfriend :-)

Thank you phrack, could not have done it without you! (i mean the first thing,
Phrack was good but not that good!)

------
grzaks
I have p63 in paper!
[https://imgur.com/a/x01WJzm](https://imgur.com/a/x01WJzm)

------
emersonrsantos
Caution - very addictive, and glorious obsolete tech. Also full of mystery.

First time I've read one was 1995 on some BBS.

~~~
dfsegoat
97ish here... re: BBS' \- still have my US Robotics 28.8 external modem...

~~~
wiz21c
USR, that was the rolls royce of modem back then. Aaaahh the sound it made.

~~~
squarefoot
And the fortune it cost. My Amiga based local BBS had a pile of them and most
online fellows had one while I couldn't even afford a Zyxel but had to connect
through a terrible 2400bps unknown name one. Thankfully it had at least Zmodem
which was almost new then. Good ol' times...

~~~
C1sc0cat
I can recall when 2400 was the new hotness and getting a hooky prototype 2400
from a colleague at Telecom Gold.

I think he used on of them on his FIDO BBS (Arkham Asylum)

------
platz
I had fun thinking about what the different color 'boxes' were e.g. blue
boxes, beige boxes etc. I don't think I ever used a blue box, but I messed
with payphones and tapped into landlines pretty easily

------
gasull
Phrack hasn't published a zine since 2016.

Is there an equivalent today to Phrack?

~~~
CalRobert
Maybe POCorGTFO?

[https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/](https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/)

------
dagw
Think I can safely say that without Phrack I wouldn't have gotten as into
computers as I did and never would have had this successful career that
followed.

Thank you Phrack.

------
rootsudo
I wish i photocopied the ones I had. :( I just sold them on ebay.

------
saldivarcher
These are awesome. :)

------
eruditely
very polarizing website, posting many interviews with antisocial hackers(still
cool though) but also more nicely minded ones.

~~~
eb0la
Antisocial people who started their own infosec companies and now are high
level executives in multinationals that bought them.

It's funny how time (and life) changes people... from the outside.

~~~
C1sc0cat
You forgot Apple Woz was a Phreak back in the day

