How to steal gasoline using Assembler (based on real events)

Greetings to you!

Under the cut you will find a fascinating story that the narrator tells us from the first person. I only proudly publish this story for the first time here, with the permission and at the request of the author, who wished to remain anonymous.
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“Strictly speaking, the title of the article is a mistake. We did not steal gasoline, either with the help of the Assembler or with the help of an electric drill. We didn't steal it at all. It's just that life at one time forced a little to contrive and redistribute a small part of this gasoline into personal gas tanks, honestly paying at the same time all gasoline, to the penny. But why do you need to do this? Well, remember the story.

Not a very distant story, but only the 90s. In our almost southern city there was a situation when there was simply no place to buy gasoline. Neither overpaid nor an acquaintance. No Abnormal, severe shortage of gasoline stopped any desire to ride on a private car for personal use. Of course, someone solved this problem with a very significant phone call, someone simply stole gasoline from enterprises, but my colleagues and engineers had no such opportunities. And then it turned out that the power of intelligence has not been canceled. The city was supposed to provide gasoline special vehicles. It is not only police cars, ambulance and other emergency intelligence services, it is also a lot of official cars, whose passengers did not want to endure the lack of gasoline "like everyone else." How to make, that, despite traditional corruption, special vehicles were always with gasoline? Helped electronics.

Small technical details: at that time there was already a technological base for electronic metering of gasoline, there were already a lot of personal computers, in other words, personal computers with a powerful, high-speed Intel 8086 processor, or even an Intel 80286 with a clock frequency of up to 16 MHz. Very quickly, a very conscientious and responsible company has developed a complex for issuing gasoline using plastic cards. The real chip inside the card exchanged real secret codes with the receiver, and only this system could manage the filling equipment. Any manual control was disabled and sealed. The petrol station operator, a simple tanker, was now sitting in front of a real personal computer, and the driver of the special vehicle inserted the card WHERE TO NOW, and the system poured gasoline into the tank with strict regard to who, where, and how much. The floppy disk drive was turned off in the sealed-in computer, so the information protection was, so to speak, iron.

Almost iron.
Our former employee at that time worked as a tanker at a gas station: the time was difficult and we had to feed the family. What you read now may surprise you, but it was: no attempt to reach an agreement with the developers and installers of the system led to anything. Yes, they did not lead to anything. These honest guys didn’t even think to reveal the control codes of their system. But I really wanted to buy sometimes a little gasoline. There was no escape, I had to use intelligence.

Provided a slight breakdown in the personal computer, the gas station for two days stopped working. For the first day, super-system adjusters almost launched their electronics, and continued the next day. In the evening of the first day, the control of the gas station did not work yet. The professional guys stopped their work, laid down their tools, moved the rest of the work to tomorrow and left.

The stopwatch has started!
Kites, lovers of software dead in the amount of two people ran to the gas station. It is clear that no one seals the computer, when tomorrow you need to continue working, and when the system still does not work. The computer really was not sealed. Very quickly, we plugged in a wonderful, reliable 5-inch floppy disk drive and wrote down the software we needed. And the volume of the hard disk is very large, as much as 20 megabytes, anything will fit. Until that time, the installers strictly followed that in the MS-DOS operating system there was nothing superfluous, in the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files there should be only what is needed, and no more. So it was, so it was decided to upgrade the keyboard and display driver. The driver was exactly what we needed. When he is working, he is always hanging by the resident in RAM, and everyone knows that he is needed, that he cannot do without him. Began responsible work on the driver upgrade.

With the help of the disassembler, the driver program was turned into a symbolic version, into the same driver written in Assembler. Intercept the keyboard vector is no longer necessary, the driver himself does it. But in the program we added the ability to save the sequence of characters entered from the keyboard in our small buffer, and as the buffer is filled, write this information to a disk in an inconspicuous file known only to the driver. The vector for working with files was also intercepted, and now any file entered from the drive as it was opened, read and closed was carefully duplicated in a well-hidden place on the hard disk. Do not forget to hide on the disk as a simple text editor and translator with the Assembly. The computer was closed again, the drive was disconnected, and the well-hidden connector for supplying control commands to the block-point was again put into operation.

It is morning, came electronics professionals. They quickly completed their work, then they entered their secret test programs from floppy disks, comprehensively checked the system, and finally, everything was sealed up and put into working condition. Petrol station for special vehicles again earned. But these guys really keep their secrets! They carefully removed the entire testing set of programs from the hard disk, left one securely password-protected work program, carefully repacked the hard disk with the useful program SPEEDDISK.EXE and, having completed their work, left. Now no one can recover files wiped from disk, after the program SPEEDDISK.EXE even a trace of them does not remain. It remains, however, provided by us double input files in the place on the disk where we need.

I will not boast: not less than a week of our work in the evenings took to maximally deal with other people's software, which we managed to keep for ourselves, despite all attempts to protect us from these programs. Having dealt with the management, we assembled a special program that could bypass all counters pour 10 or 20 liters of gasoline, and do it without plastic cards. We did not deceive anyone, and did not reach anyone in our pockets, we just managed, with the help of an additional service program, to force the system to pour gasoline into our tanks.

But what about accounting and control? After all, the amount of gasoline at the gas station decreased! Yes, it was decreasing, and the shortage was charged from those tankers, whose shifts were lacking. Refueling agents paid to the cashier the money we paid them for gasoline.

This is how the “group of comrades” with higher education was able to ease the situation with the lack of gasoline. Not for everyone, but only for myself, at the same time did not ruin anyone, and did not steal anything. And over time it became easier with gasoline, and the electronic refueling system of special vehicles was eliminated due to uselessness.

I do not praise our actions, just remember. And when I read that the current pseudo-intellectuals are cleaning other people's bank cards, when I read that children of degenerates who have seized upon the government suddenly become monstrously rich and “talented in business” when ... But don't you know yourself? Just do not want to develop this topic, because my article is not about those people whom I, in fact, do not consider people to be. They are all taken in bulk, a place underground, in a mine, that is.

In vain I remembered about them, even the mood dropped. I just wanted to tell you how we once "broke other people's secrets." Wanted and told. And although our hacking, of course, may seem ridiculous and naive, but this is just a story, and you need to treat it as a story. ”