Sunday, April 24, 2005

pwnt

Here's a great story about some l33t haXX0r shooting himself in the foot with his script-kiddy ways. I can't even count how many times in the early days of the commercial internet some little kiddy got in my face and tried to ping-flood me off the net. A couple of years later they were more successful, thanks to the legions of IE lusers whose computers had been turned into botnet nodes. Once I was playing Quake online and some little wannahack didn't take too kindly to anyone who played better than him... he hit me so hard my ISP called me on the phone to find out what the hell had just happened :)

When the legions of AOL 'hackers' came along it was pretty easy to use their idiocy against them. Once upon a time when IRC rooms were the arenas in which the hackerbe's played their little games, all servers on the net had a service called chargen (character generator) that just spewed out alphanumeric characters at a very high rate... you could use it to check connectivity and bandwidth between two computers. On a few occasions I 'accidently' let slip that my port 19 was unprotected, and I'd see a couple dozen script-kiddies flood themselves off the IRC server. Later they'd claim that I had (insert random line from William Gibson book here) and that they'd get me next time.

I'm still waiting :)