Cases of bygone days

Today's topic about young idiots steep hakirs somehow suddenly inspired unprecedented nostalgia and the memories fell on me with terrible force. Long ago, when computers were large, brains were small, and in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation there was still no article 272,

So, in the year 96, when windows-95 was already released, and the computers on which it could work were not delivered yet, I studied in the first year of a Ural university. It must be said that by that time my colleagues and I already had some IT background, expressed mainly in acquaintance with all three high-level programming languages ​​available at that time, and also (which was considered an incredible toughness) with assembly language, mainly for z80 processor. Even fidoshnikami in those glorious times were far from all, and the existence of the Internet went only some vague rumors, the truth in which there was no more than 10 percent. So, the local network of the university, built on the basis of a terrible, current-boosting coaxial, through which only IPX ran, was for us a big novelty.

So, the first test that fell to our lot was the need to work in a computer class, where there were no hard disks in the systemists as a class, and the systemists themselves were wooden based on 386DX40, with 4 megabytes of memory. Very much nothing, by the way, were cars for those times. The lack of disks was compensated by the presence of a Novell Netware server, where each student was allocated a section of the size (do not laugh) 512 kilobytes. From the same server and loading occurred. 640 kilobytes in those glorious times was enough for everything, but 512 is not very good, because the very first concern of any student who wanted to keep toys fully developed in an IT specialist was to find ways to circumvent this limitation. And we found it!
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The first to find their way were three computer maniacs who were older than me on the course. They mastered the programming of resident programs for MSDOS and immediately realized their knowledge by writing the simplest keylogger. By the way, they were sure that they were the first to invent keylogging in history and were very proud of it! Keyloger was recorded on a diskette, which was “accidentally” left in the drive of one of the class computers. The victim, sitting at the computer and entering the password, did not suspect that he immediately gets on the diskette, which was immediately removed with an apology by some kind of “forgetful” sophomore. I don’t remember exactly how I became friends with them, it seems they tried to catch me for the same trick, however, a couple of months later our team had already created serious problems for local system administrators. However, we have always tried to avoid acts of vandalism.

So, by the time of my entry into the gang of our acquaintance with friends, there was already an extensive database of stolen logins and passwords, constantly updated. But it was difficult to use them, because the attempt to write something voluminous to someone else’s section immediately became noticeable to the “donor”, ​​he began to find out what the problem was, found our files and ter. Then we (by scientific method, of course, since the documentation was physically absent) sorted out with the system of access rights and learned how to create “twigs” - directories hidden from the owner, but open to us. Criminal business has blossomed! Although we were not familiar with the ideology of the Western Hacker movement, but, as I see now, our principles are quite in line with it - the information should have been free and accessible to everyone! Our "twigs" have gained popularity. There you could always find fresh software, source programs for laboratory work for all courses (the pearl of our collection!), Music in progressive format s3m, as well as various programs and funny texts that we wrote on our own, for the love of art. It must be said that some of our programs had certain undocumented properties, thanks to which the “branches” grew larger and stronger, and we never had problems with free space. Especially, after the sysadmin of the Physics Department fell on our bait. The launch of this ugliness of our own e-mail system, the operation of which we, of course, developed on our own, became the apofigey :)

However, over time, this activity became annoying and we began to look for new adventures on our asses . About how we found them and what came out of it - the next time ...