DrugBuyers.Com: Re: PHREAKING

Checking this thread this morning to see if anyone had added any more memories (with promises of discontinuing this off-topic conversation long forgotten) I re-read my last post there, and it really made me think.

Am I that old? Did something change somewhere? Are times really that different? Have I become an untrusting coward hoping that the current flock of kids is deprived of the same opportunities to grow emotionally by finding a way to beat the system like we did?

Would anybody who has been participating in this thread mind sharing your thoughts on this subject? Think - nowdays most kiddiez hack on the web, they are preoccupied by defacing web sites with other people's scripts. That is all well and dandy, and I see it as no different than spraypaint tagging buildings (or releasing viruses - putting THEIR code onto YOUR PC - low-level mammal behavior, young teenage tomcats spraying the drapes).

But someone mentioned wardialing - remember that? Remember exploring the telco inside and out and piecing together how the switches networked and how you could get to various switching interfaces (like MSI) from even low-level accounts (I am talking specifically about one large telco in this example, but the same thing applies to the others). Do people still do that, and are there still kids who climb through trash bins?

Do people still hack property appraiser computers to dump your local telco's properties (since they are rarely labeled from the outside, usually they are just solid brick buildings) then driven around through their parking lots jotting down tag numbers, then running those through DMV to get the registrar's name and address, then using that info to do a CBI/Equifax pull to get their SSN so now you have a significant part of that employee's password (and yea spouses cars, leases, company cars - drive around in half a dozen parking lots and jot down 20 or 30 tag numbers and we'd end up with half a dozen passwords easily).

Do people still do stuff like that? Does it mean that because I'm now pushing 40 I am getting old and scared of people who WERE JUST LIKE ME when I was their age? Not the kids specifically, more power and freedom to them, but because of the global situation, it isn't difficult to imagine genuinely evil people being able to piece stuff together the same as we did. I know a lot has changed and the telcos are much much more aware of what is going on, but still, I am thinking of one specific time when we had a GTE supervisor stoned out of her mind sitting on my couch talking about how they hold regular security meetings to discuss how to tell if someone is trying to con you out of info, what never to talk about, etc - I asked her flat-out "Did they ever tell you in those meetings NOT to sit in a room full of hackers describing your security meetings?" and she just laughed and said yes they did. BTW her favorite recreational drug of choice was huffing Scotchguard, the stuff you protect furniture with. This is someone who is trusted with propriatary data by a very major telco (again this is years ago and much has hopefully changed).

If teenagers could do it then, could well-financed zealot terrorists do it again? Remember, Carnivore / DCS-1000 is only watching IP on the Internet, and we are talking about the PSTN.

I am dying to know what people think - is certain kinds of hacking somehow WORSE now than it was, because of our global situation, is it MORE evil? Is it more dangerous to the country as a whole that there are people (like me and most decent hacks I know) who genuinely don't care about the law, we just look at it as another obstacle that has to be accounted for and addressed?

Is it time to "come together" and NOT fight "Big Brother" because these days he is on our side?

Because of contractual obligation, I cannot say more about this, but this much has already been made public - shortly there will be biometric scanners on all commercial aircraft that do facial recognition of the person sitting in every seat, and of course recording activity aboard the plane. Is this good or bad?

I said before, penicillin saves thousands of lives, but it is deadly poisonous to some people - so is it good or evil, and the answer was that penicillin is MOLD, good and evil are just objective labels like terrorist and freedom fighter. If you read the Iraq blogs anymore, you see that the USA troops in Iraq right now are "terrorists" to the people who live there, and "freedom fighters" to OUR media.

I guess I've typed myself into a corner - it is no longer a question of "is hacking now more or less a threat to our daily lives than it was `in the day'" as it is a question of what the distinction between good and evil is, and how we as a society make this decision.

Okay I admit it, I don't know where I'm rambling to, but I'd love to hear comments from any of the older-school people who have thought about this before and wondered what the future held. Do we need sunglasses because the future is so bright, or because the blast will blind us until the particles melt us?

Sorry for the long and off-topic rant. It wasn't intended to be like this, but the coffee just kept the fingers moving.