The Planet's Most Moronic Hacker

RawGutts writes "This is the story of "bitchchecker" (the hacker) a user who lost it because he thought he had been kicked of an IRC channel by "Elch". The hacker comes back on the channel threatening to hack and ruin Elch's machine, and dares Elch to give his IP address. The address given was 127.0.0.1. "

Life imitating art, possibly?

[soapbox]

Life imitates art (or else some would-be "author" copies Illiad):

Another reason [userfriendly.org] people should read Userfriendly.org [userfriendly.org].

Oh nooo

[maztuhblastah]

Aggggh!! He's hax0r3ed my computer... I have the same IP... he was using my machine!!!

Had a similar, RL case

[Badgerman]

Trying to deal with an idiot on IRC. The server maintainer told him to try our alternate server at 127.0.0.1. And to keep trying because sometimes it was hard to get in.

Never saw him again.

punishable offense

[dance2die]

isn't making private IP public punishable by law?

I've heard of similar things

[whitetiger0990]

But this just pushes the limit on stupidity! Sometimes I wonder if these people are even human. I mean come on, how did he even get on IRC?

Well if anyone wants to hack me my domain name is: localhost

I don't think...

[Patman]

...that anyone who posts a ten-year-old joke as news should be calling anyone else a moron.

Seriously, this or things like it have been around since the idea of a loopback was presented. There's got to be at least a dozen posts to bash.org with the joke, it's used on IRC at least daily, and as others have pointed out, it's previosuly been in UF and Dilbert.
It's like Taco just figured out loopbacks, and he's all proud.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[LarsWestergren]

That this is a hoax. It's simply not feasible.

What? No, no, that is not possible. They have a chatlog as evidence and everything! And it is on the frontpage of Slashdot so you KNOW it has to be true.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[jellomizer]

Well it is feasible. Script kiddies have downloaded all these cool little programs that break into their systems without any understanding on how computers or the internet work. They think their are Hot Stuff because they found the programs to break and screw with the computer. And it is probably very easy for them to get in because their local IP address is on the other side of the firewall (hardware and software). Plus because he is such a bad lier, I am sure he beleaves the junk he hears from other kiddies, with suff like the reversing firwall that attacks the connecting system.

Re:My URL.

[Mintee]

You know Al Gore's son? Neat-o

Re:My URL.

[DenDave]

Man I usually turn to attrition.org's going postal for a laugh but this is wild!

ROFL!!!

Re:Oh nooo

[maxwell demon]

Well, you should have followed the good advice of the RIAA: Always protect your valuable IP! ;-)

Re:This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[KDan]

We once convinced this guy that "peer" was this l33t h4x0r who monitored all of irc and randomly disconnected people he didn't like, and/or people who badmouthed him. That was fun.

Daniel

Re:The Planet's Most Moronic Slashdot Post

[A beautiful mind]

Hello Captain Obvious, you're Obviously late, does the Obviousmobile need some servicing?

Priceless??

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC Client: Free

Acting like an idiot on IRC: Free

Threatening to hack somebody on IRC: Free

Having your alias plastered on Slashdot for all to see because you're an Idiot: Priceless!

Re:heh funny, but what about all the others like i

[mikael]

There was another one I remember reading on slashdot where some guys managed to persuade another that it was perfectly safe to repeatedly type in his system password because it would only appear as ****'s to them.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[FidelCatsro]

Reminds me of a time i was on irc once , this guy stormed into the room shouting and threatening to hack everyones computers (aparently he had been banned the night before).
So i did a whois and a few other things and found out he was using windows.
It was fairly obvious that at best the guy was a skript kiddie and had hardly any knowlidge of the system .So i said "hey mate i just hacked your system"
he mutterd some obscenitys and not so polietly asked me to prove it .
So i said to him to type msconfig in a command prompt(i still have some working knowlidge of windows).

He then continue to mutter obscenitys about this having already been there , i decided to elaborate and told him i had installed two services as proof of my skill , those were RPC and messenger(this was a few years back) . He started becoming increasingly disturbed so i went for the kill and had a freind who uses windows to netsend him a message(he had forgoten to mask his ip) and in the message it said," the only way to remove the ""Virus was to deselect the rpc service and reboot" .
A few moments later a ping timeout message and the guy was never heard from again.

People have BitchChecker pegged all wrong

[selectspec]

Bitchchecker has been maligned by the press and the mob here. It's clear that bitchchecker simply spared these computer neophytes from certain demise. Why? Because bitchchecker is too cool to waste his time on some fools.

Re:How is this newsworthy?

[dubdays]

You have to remember that this is slashdot...

Think back to April Fools Day.

Call me OT, flamebait, whatever. But seriously, 98% of that crap on April 1 was not funny. Irritated me so much that I decided to re-format my hard drive that day. Seriously.

warez.phantom.com

[scovetta]

Anyone else remember warez.phantom.com? It was a DNS entry (duh) that resolved to 127.0.0.1. Very useful to fool the newbies.

HEY! This guy has all of my files!!!

The Ping of NO CARRIER

[Ezza]

Back in the early days of IRC when everybody used dial up (and most people thought a firewall was something your car had), a lot of people had really crappy modems with badly written firmware (usually winmodems).

Anyway, when someone started acting like that idiot in the story on IRC, daring people to hack their machine or whatever, I'd say "OK" and send them a ping with the payload:

+++ATH0^M

And half the time, they'd suddenly leave the channel and come back a few minutes later complaining about their ISP or their phone line or something.

And I'd just be quietly giggling to myself.

It was really fun because the arrogance/stupidity of these kinds of kiddies on IRC was directly proportional to the likelyhood of them having a crap modem that would fall for that...

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[ajs]

Of course it's almost certainly a hoax, but these are always fun to read. If you ever played EverQuest, there's a very similar bit about the clueless ebayer [ancarett.com] who thought the game would be easy as long as you yelled at people a lot ;-)

similar method for avoiding spam

[k2enemy]

i get annoyed with sites that have unnecessary free registrations. instead of making up email addresses, i started using root@127.0.0.1

hopefully it annoys the site operators. plus, it's not really lying since that is one of my email addresses.

Re:Bash.org?

[Ford Prefect]

Sounds rather familiar to me...

I think the problem's more that it's been done so many times before.

To add a bit of variation, the more clueful admin could have given a joke hostname, like one some wit at my university set up many years ago...

warez.mcc.ac.uk - "loads of stuff, but I've got it all already!"

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[GodHead]

"Another reason people should read Userfriendly.org."

That makes one reason.

I H@CKED HIM

[bitchchecker]

my puter kept crashing!... I can hack all of you...i dare you to give me your ip Address if you dont il'll have my dad band you from our information superhighway!...we own it! suckers!! n e wayz, i dare you to post your ip, i hack soo fast you can't know what i did. you all pussies hahahahaaa...i can hack all of youi 127.0.01ers onl;y pussies use firewalls...turn it off and we fight

Re:The Planet's Most Moronic Slashdot Post

[tapo]

does the Obviousmobile need some servicing? Does it? It should be obvious.

Re:This has happened on every IRC channel ever

[SComps]

Years ago, on the early days of DALnet we used to have the newbies that asked for operator status to type /helpop OP ME ASSHOLE!

the resulting kill by an ircop never ceased to be entertaining.

I'm a netadmin for a very small network now, and while not proud of my youthful indiscretions, I still snicker a bit when I think of it.

This was a fun reminder of better days.

Reminded me of a story....

[dcigary]

...something I pulled on a classmate in college.

Way back in the olden days, we had a VAX/VMS mini that we did all our Computer Science projects on. Being bored one day, I wrote a "Fortune Cookie" program one day that others could include into their login profile to get a random fortune when they log in.

I decided to mess with a certain person's mind who was dialing in from home to the system (at a blazing 2400baud, mind you). I modified my Fortune code to detect that it was him logging, in, and when he did, it spawned off a new process that would inject random characters onto his screen at random intervals. I put the code in place, and watched the fun.

We saw him log in, and then log out after about a minute. Then log back in again. And then log out. And then back in again. And then out. After a while, he sent us an email complaining that he couldn't get a clean phone line into the system that evening for the life of him. Hee hee. I don't think we ever fussed up to it.

bitchchecker's thoughts as he starts the attack

[sootman]

wow, this guy I'm hacking may be a dick, but he's got a *really* fast connection.

For those who need to read more

[Nik Picker]

if you highlight the story with your mouse and then press ALT and F4 together then you can open a new window with the story in.

This advice is also relevant when on IRC or MSN Chat and you wish to contact the adminstrator.

Of Course this only work for Windows users since Microsoft wish ed to make your life much easier by iuncluding this great keyboard shortcut !

Urban myth?

[ByeLaw]

Come on, nobody can be that dumb, can they?

Re:People

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, clicking on virus spam is the only way his mother can get him to visit!

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[kin_korn_karn]

I used to change channel topics to read "User Op Day! Press ALT-F4 For Ops!" and watch half the channel drop :)

Re:I'll take that bet...

[JaJ_D]

We explained to the parents that 127.0.0.1 was the local PC's IP

Oh NOW I understand why it's funny

;-]

Jaj

10 bucks says...

[toonworld]

He was an AOL user

Re:Oh nooo

[Gzip Christ]

Always protect your valuable IP!

Please help! I just found out that my computer is broadcasting my IP address. Every time I connect to the Internet, send email or submit private information to a web site, I am broadcasting this unique address. With this address, someone can immediately begin attacking my computer. If only there were something I could download to protect myself.

Re:Please Rob, don't do this - OT to some extent

[odaiwai]

...overcome your editorial standards.

You must be new here.

Re:How is this newsworthy?

[SB5]

Have you tried recompiling your humour kernel? Try the British flavor, you should at least chuckle with that installed.

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[FidelCatsro]

[10:28]<me> your kidding , how the hell can you fake an irc log
[10:28]<you> like this!!!!
[10:29]<me> oh is this a fake irc log
[10:29]<you> yes it is
[10:29]<me> hm ,,, how odd

Transcript of above mentioned chatlog

[Yolegoman]

<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

Re:Urban myth?

[tres3]

My Mother called me shortly after I set up her first computer (1999) almost in tears because windows told her that she had performed an illegal operation and she thought the police were on the way. I have seen mice on the floor and people trying to use them like a sewing peddle. I have seen people pick up mice and point them at the computer like a remote control. I have seen a 5 1/4" floppy drive with four disks crammed into it because the program said insert next disk and press any key to continue (it didn't tell him to remove the other disk first). I have had a tech call about a new computer that wouldn't work only to discover that there was a power blackout. I have heard a former boss of mine tell the user that the problem was probably in the keyboard; when asked what could be wrong with the keyboard he exclaimed that it was the dumbass pushing the buttons. And I have had a user complain about the phone making a terrible noise while they were online. I even got a phone call about the computer not returning a credit card after an online purchase; the user had inserted it into the 3 1/2" drive.

To answer your question: Yes, there are people that are that dumb.

Invent an idiot proof computer and someone will build a better idiot!

WTF?

[dcigary]

Why the hell was parent moderated DOWN to "Overrated"? Jeebus Tapdancing Christ someone needs to read the "Moderator Guidelines" or get a frickin' life.

Re:For those who need to read more

[Per Wigren]

Related:

[s0m3d00d] You can access my porn fileserver by typing "/disco chicks nude".
*** aaa disconnected. (chicks nude)
*** bbb disconnected. (chicks nude)
*** ccc disconnected. (chicks nude)
*** ddd disconnected. (chicks nude)

Hey !

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you doing with pictures of my wife ??

Mirror incase of slashdotting

[PatrickThomson]

here [127.0.0.1]

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[wheany]

I read some of the strips 7 years ago. Has his art improved yet?

Re:warez.phantom.com

[Ruzty]

I used to give out an address that led to some servers at the FBI. I admin'ed several hundred domain names at the time and made various entries under different domains all pointed at such well watched US government servers.

I rarely saw the results of what happened when men in dark suits came knocking at their door, but my imagination was satisfaction enough.

Re:At least it's a reason!

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy, it drops your IQ level into the single digits.

Oh wait, you said a reason TO read PA, not one of the many reasons why NOT to read PA.

My mistake, never mind.

Re:Oh nooo

[bicho]

Yeah!
Your IP is in the public domain.
Now you can't sue anyone who has a need to use it.
I am sorry, but once your IP is apr of the public domain, there is nothing to do about it.

Re:*Cracker*, dammit!

[Cyno]

There's no need to get all racist about it. So what if he's white. He's just an idiot.

Re:The Planet's Most Moronic Slashdot Post

[TheoMurpse]

I wish I had my Halloween photos from two years ago -- I went to the big Halloween party on 6th Street in Austin dressed as Captain Obvious; I just put some crazy mismatched clothes on and stapled a big sign to my shirt that said "CAPTAIN OBVIOUS". When people would ask me who I was supposed to be, I would say in a rather large voice, "I'M CAPTAIN OBVIOUS ISN'T IT OBVIOUS HAHAHAHAHAHAHA" and run away.

Yes, I am aware of how stupid I am.

Re:Life imitating art, possibly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely, reading User Friendly is like biting down really hard on an ass sandwich.

My favourite ...

[aspeer]

<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

Are you serious?!

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of shit gets posted, when so many good articles get shitcanned? What the fuck barbeque?

This story reminds me of this one time when this script kiddie asked me for my IP address and I told him 127.0.0.1! Oh wait, that's because it's the same fucking story! That's because everyone has seen this done or done it themselves once in their fucking life, and nobody fucking cares.

Let me tell you another story. This one time, I was at a coffee shop, and the girl making the coffee was hot, and she said something to me, and my response was witty and cute, and she laughed and it was funny and it made me feel cool. Then I drank my coffee, went home, and masturbated.

NEWSFLASH: Nobody fucking cares!

BT

Teg Teg, tell him about the time you were witty!

Hey. HEEEEEYYYY!!

[krygny]

That's MY IP address!

SONOFABITCH!!

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

My personal favorite:

I do alot of rollouts. Barely IT work at all, the guy who mops the control center floor at NASA doesn't get to claim to be an astronaut or rocket scientist either. But the worst rollout ever, was for a public school system.

This public school system was more ghetto than most, by rollout, I mean maybe replacing 3-5 of the PCs in labs that had 20 (so there was always a mix of crap systems), maybe only half the computer lab rooms in any one building. And often, things would never be scheduled right, so we were told to go in the rooms even during class, and just be quiet, teachers knew we'd be there, wasn't a problem.

Being ghetto, the kids weren't expected to do real schoolwork, and would goof off. Porn sites, gambling, all the stupidest shit you've ever seen. Well, 20 minutes into this, almost done setting it all up, this black girl screams, "Oh my god, it say I won a million dollar, is it fo real!?!". A stupid spammy popup of course, but she had no critical thinking skills, nor had anyone ever bothered to tell her how much spam like this was out there. No big deal right, she's a kid?

So, me being the fool that I am, I try to explain to her what it is, not sarcastic or anything. Really. Can't remember how I worded it, but the tone of my voice was such that I was trying my best not to sound like I was patronizing, nor like I was making fun of her. Before I had even finished the one sentence, the cow-like teacher was "How do you know, she might have won something, you jus don want her to win." As the teacher waddled over to the computer screen, I shut up, she didn't bother to follow up with a tirade, and I finished up as soon as possible. Got the hell out of there.

Re:Are you serious?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you another story. This one time, I was at a coffee shop, and the girl making the coffee was hot, and she said something to me, and my response was witty and cute, and she laughed and it was funny and it made me feel cool. Then I drank my coffee, went home, and masturbated.

Something similar happened to me but when the girl said something to me I just grumbled something and looked away. I think she said something like "Do you have a stareing problem?" But I went home and masturbated all the same.

Not so smart

[Anonymous Coward]

If he was smart, he'd have told Slashdot his website was at http://127.0.0.1

BT

Re:I'll bet everyone $10

[gkitty]

Though I tend to believe these things about as much as the amateur stories in Hustler, the story seems technically plausable and I have no doubt many people actually are this technically incompetent.

I used to work with a fellow whose hobby was to harass and attempt to discredit the Scientologists. They claimed he had posted their intellectual property on the internet, and when he was deposed he stated that their material was indeed available at 127.0.0.1 .

They quoted this verbatim in their claim against him, so it made it past whoever was responsible for fact checking the claim, and he boasted around the water cooler how he had bested the scientology legal staff. He explained 'localhost' on the stand and the claim was thrown out.

He was rather an odd fellow. I had quite forgotten him until some 10 years later I saw his name appear on slashdot in an appeal for money for his legal defense fund.

Alt-F4

[Veinor]

If you know that someone is running *nix, tell them 'Do a kill -9 for secret Unix hacking tips!'

Re:Hey !

[Anonymous Coward]

What is he doing with my pictures of your wife?!

IPv6 ruining all the fun?

[KhaymanUCSD]

Everyone's got stories of feeding the idiots the loopback address. With the advent of IPv6, I wonder how many people will be succeptable to this when you tell them that your IP is ::1. Maybe 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 they'll fall for...

Re:Bash.org?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never taken a class in postmodernism. If you carefully deconstruct the events, you'd be able to see past the obvious and get to the essence of the real story. 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address. Loopback is simply a synonym for "myself." Our antihero protagonist was therefore attacked by himself. His reactions, however, show that he was unaware this was a self referential occurence. He is clearly blocking that knowledge from his conscious. It seems likely that he is therefore suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. This is a fascinating psychological study of the protagonist as antagonist. And you completely missed it.

Re:article mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea. i've posted a mirror here:

http://localhost/hacker.html

Mirror

[illuminatedwax]

Because of the severe slashdotting, Elch himself is providing a mirror to the article. Check it out at this site [127.0.0.1].

Re:Bash.org?

[Shaper_pmp]

Really? I understood the whole episode to be a superbly-constructed allegory on the ultimately self-destructive nature of violent antisocial behaviour, with a side-moral on the dangers of hubris and the essential importance of external affirmation as an error-preventative strategy... or something... :-\

(Yeah, ok, I used to date a Lit Crit major. And you've obviously never handed in a paper on Postmodernism, either - your post was a feasible, intelligible and practically credible treatise. This is Postmodernism - You don't get points for being right, you know, just for being clever [catalog.com]).

Re:Oh nooo

[anglozaxxon]

It's called 'Windows XP SP2'.

Re:Mirror incase of slashdotting

[sicapo27]

Also here [192.168.0.1] and here [10.0.0.1]

Re:I'll take that bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, now that you know, don't tell anyone, we geeks like to keep this nugget of 1337 info secret.

It is like the secret [freemasonrywatch.org] masonic handshake, if you ever come accross someone yu think might be a geek, just drop that IP into conversation and you're instantly friends like all us guys here at SlashDot.

Re:Are you serious?!

[Mr. Cancelled]

NEWSFLASH: Nobody fucking cares!

bitchecker?? Isat u?

Re:Are you serious?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you another story. This one time, I was at a coffee shop, and the girl making the coffee was hot, and she said something to me, and my response was witty and cute, and she laughed and it was funny and it made me feel cool. Then I drank my coffee, went home, and masturbated.

NEWSFLASH: Nobody fucking cares!

No, please. Do go on, you are just the kind of guy I have been looking for all day. Spice it up a little, I am already all damp and tickly....

BTW, I am 22 years old, my measurements are 34-25-32...and the other leg too.

Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack!

[DeputySpade]

In light of my undying optimism and hope for the future of all mankind, I am going to refrain from assuming what others have, that you need instruction. Instead I will assume that this was one of the more masterful trolls we will see on /. today. Well done.

<keanu>WOAH</keanu>

[TiggertheMad]

This story reminds me of this one time when this script kiddie asked me for my IP address and I told him 127.0.0.1!

Hey that is freakin, spooky, because that is my IP address! I thought these things were supposed to be unique...

Re:Yes, there are people that dumb

[coronaride]

Kind of reminds me of a time when I was doing computer repair. I got a call from this guy whose computer wasn't turning on at all. I got there and the guy demonstrated to me how the computer wasn't turning on when he'd plug it in. He proceeded to take the power plug and jab it in and out of the electrical outlet very rapidly, much to my surprise. After doing this for about 10 seconds or so, he pulled it out for good, looked at me, and said, "See? Nothing's happening!" Suddenly, there was an intense arc of electricity between the plug and the outlet which, at that time, were about 2 feet away from each other. I don't even know how it's physically possible for this to happen, but I really didn't have to think to hard to realize that his computer was toast. Idiots are everywhere..

Seriously, what's so moronic about this?

[anewsome]

The victim must be a moron himself. I just hacked into 127.0.0.1 myself and the guy's system is still vulnerable. Un-freaking-believable. You would think that after a huge slashdot story about how moronic this guy was, he would fix his system. What an idiot!

www.yourserver.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so long ago, I was at a customer site. Some developer was trying out this new open source web application. He was trying to connect to the host as mentioned in the Quick Start documentation: www.yourserver.com. After what would have been the best part of an hour, he came to me and started asking how to reboot the servers since something was wrong.

When I saw the problem and explained to him that this was just a sample hostname and he should replace it with the real name or the ip, he looked at me with a rather dumb expression and asked if that would be www.myserver.com.

I had a very difficult time not to laugh in front of the customer. This is really a true story. Although the story made me laugh, it also made me feel scared in some way.

Re:Had a similar, RL case

[alienmole]

You'll find out once you reach puberty.

Re:Are you serious?!

[Chicago Wolves]

Dude... I just choked on my Sprite from reading your post.