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Re: When Hacking Was in Its Infancy [telecom]

***** Moderator's Note *****

> > If kids in high school were "breaking into master accounts" in 1970, > I'd like to see the news reports and/or court records that show > it. These vague claims don't cut it.

This involved the time sharing systems of a school district where I was employed. The time sharing system of the time had a "chief executive account" which had the ability to create new signons, library size, and other maintenance and supervisory functions that regular users were not allowed to do. The kids involved were caught and punished; but there was no news reports nor court records as it was handled internally.

Also, kids would find the logon of commercial accounts and use them to access other time sharing systems and snoop around libraries. The kids were curious about working with advanced functions other time sharing systems might offer.

A year or so later the school district got an HP-2000 machine for BASIC timesharing which was supposedly hacker proof since chief executive functions were performed only by the computer's console, not by any account. However, the kids discovered a glitch in the software in which they could cause the computer to crash and shut down, and crashed it from time to time. The school district was not amused because service was disrupted. The kids were caught and punished, but again it was handled internally.

I guess by today's standards it all doesn't seem like very much, but back then it was a big deal.

Reply to
HAncock4
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I don't know about 1970, but in 1977 or so, I was one of those kids. Our teachers were incredibly stupid with password security (one teacher kept a copy of the password written on a piece of paper stuck under her coffee cup with a piece of tape), and the students had the run of the timesharing system. We wrote some great games!

As for news reports and court records - that stuff simply did not apply in the 70s. You had to something really outrageous to even get caught, let alone prosecuted in those days - some of the dumber phreakers got in trouble, but hackers, in the original sense of the word (you did NOT break stuff), no way. *

Reply to
PV

I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me, but suffice it to say that things like password protection, proper disposal of printouts and the like were once uncommon.

There was a day when people's passwords would be echoed back on the teletype when they entered them, and their session would be printed out and left in the terminal room. Or it would be printed on their JOB card which was left unattended on the top of their deck in a bin. Or someone would call up a remote computer which did not have proper modem control, to discover themselves in the middle of someone else's existing session. Or they would notice that at a particular site the default password for any account was the account name spelled backwards and that the default passwords that came with the OS were still set so OPERATOR/OPERATOR got you a prompt.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

Let me guess, it was running MONTANA BASIC....

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

Or how on DEC PDP systems under RSTS/E you could allocate and assign terminals to a process - didn't matter who you were.

Had one running on the System console one time - and one night it hiccuped and of course the dump had my ID all over it. Ooops!

Reply to
T

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