The Planet's Most Moronic Hacker 849
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. "
I'll bet everyone $10 (Score:4, Interesting)
A slightly different twist... (Score:5, Interesting)
sanity check (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:People (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:sanity check (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A slightly different twist... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll take that bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
The kid was, of course, an idiot. He could never get an assignment done because, in his words, it was too easy and beneath him. A sample assignment that he couldn't do would be to flash an LED once per second by writing an application in C - my version of the program was about 8 lines long.
After a sit down trying to level set him and tell him he wasn't as smart as he thought he was, he berated me and the teacher and told us that he was going to show us how good he was and trash our systems. I told him go for it, as I had a router firewall as well as a software firewall on my PC at home.
He asked for my IP and wrote "127.0.0.1" carefully on his hand.
The school didn't see him for a week and when he came in, he accused me that to stop him from hacking my computer, I hacked his. His parents were pretty agitated because the home computer was trashed and they wanted to bring a lawsuit against me.
We explained to the parents that 127.0.0.1 was the local PC's IP address and any attacks directed against this IP would actually be on the launching computer. We told them to go to a computer store and confirm what we were saying. We never heard back from the parents and the kid never returned to the class.
I've told a few people that if they want to show off how good they are, let's see them hack my computer at 127.0.0.1 over the years (it's in "123 Robot Experiments for the Evil Genius") and 60% of the time they've gotten the joke immediately. For the remainder, except for this one time, everybody else has figured it out before damage was done.
myke
Re:warez.phantom.com (Score:4, Interesting)
; <<>> DiG 9.3.1 <<>> warez.mcc.ac.uk
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 20043
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;warez.mcc.ac.uk. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
warez.mcc.ac.uk. 3600 IN A 127.0.0.1
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mcc.ac.uk. 2895 IN NS utserv.mcc.ac.uk.
mcc.ac.uk. 2895 IN NS curlew.cs.man.ac.uk.
mcc.ac.uk. 2895 IN NS gannet.scg.man.ac.uk.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
utserv.mcc.ac.uk. 2895 IN A 130.88.200.6
curlew.cs.man.ac.uk. 11579 IN A 130.88.13.7
gannet.scg.man.ac.uk. 43500 IN A 130.88.94.110
;; Query time: 201 msec
;; SERVER: 64.182.4.32#53(64.182.4.32)
;; WHEN: Wed Apr 27 07:57:21 2005
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 186
Re:I'll bet everyone $10 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes, there are people that dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
If "Program Files" and the System root are in the second half that's being deleted, and it's a delete and not a format, then yes, I can see that happening.
As a matter of fact I have seen this happen before. At a former job, we had a sales guy who insisted on "cleaning up" his hard drive every now and then. In Windows 98 he deleted large swaths of the Windows directory and Program Files, and the system ran for the rest of the day. When he rebooted however, the system was dead.
The same sales guy did it again during the W2K roll out. The users all had admin accounts on their machines (Don't ask, it was because of a political nightmare involving a management staff who thought having less than an administrator account meant they were being treated like children.)
Anyway, he tried to delete the c:\winnt folder, and kept at it while getting error messages about files being in use. He finally called IT when he got tired of "File in use" errors. I got up there and listened politely as he explained what he'd been doing.
"You know of course that Windows 2000 is based on Windows NT, right?"
"Yeah, but I'm not running NT, so I don't need it."
"In Windows 2000, the WINNT folder is the same thing as the Windows directory in 98. Did you notice that you don't have a Windows directory?"
He tried to reboot, and sure enough, the system was dead.
A management meeting ensued where I had to defend "Renaming the Windows directory" on the new Windows 2000 systems. The fact that it's the default name, and that the systems came from Dell that way, meant nothing. The company owner repeatedly told me to "Just rename it, I don't see why you'd have to redo the server."
The moral of the story is of course, that Windows is surprisingly resilient in terms of running as vital system files are deleted from underneath it.
Re:Other fun IP addresses to attack! (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, on a windows XP machine the following happens:
Pinging 127.54.34.67 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128
While on my Mepis box I get the following:
PING 127.43.54.2 (127.43.54.2): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.43.54.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.0 ms
Re:Bash.org? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:News? (Score:5, Interesting)
New recruits have been getting sent out for things like left-handed smoke shifters, buckets of prop wash, pieces of shore line, and similar fool's errands for as long as there have been armies. Gofer jokes [utc.edu] and snipe hunts [answerbag.com] are old as the hills, but it's still funny when you find someone clueless enough to fall for one.
Pranking clueless newbies is a time-honored tradition, and is a necessary rite of passage for the prankee.
The vanity plate NONE (Score:3, Interesting)
The canonical warning tale is probably the genius who got the vanity plate NONE. He routinely parked illegally since the ticket would be issued to NONE and the system would kick it out as uncollectable.
Until one fine day when a clerk noticed that someone had registered a car with that vanity plate. He put 2 and 2 together and our genius got hit with tens of thousands of dollars in fines because his tickets caught up with him... and so did tickets for countless abandoned cars.
I don't know if this is just an urban legend, but it's definitely a good warning against being too cute.
More real-life examples .... moronic lawyers (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course this is the same deposition where they tried to find out the real name of that evil 'majordomo' who was running all those anti-scientology mailing lists
Re:Deleting hard drive (Score:2, Interesting)
I've hotplugged my DVD drive on the ATA bus. No big deal, as long as the computer starts up with it it will let you unplug it with no more problems than a few error messages. Plug back in, and it still works. The ATA interface is very simple, not much can happen if stuff is unplugged. Basically the two problems are the fact that commands will fail (d'oh) and that the outputs are left in an open state and may float around. The latter depends on the controller chip, and the former on the software.
I'll unplug my HDD now, just to see what happens. (same risk as a power failure, and I've yet to see a power failure kill my reiserfs partition.) Note I'm running Xorg and amaroK playing MP3s and a bunch of software. Let's see what happens.
Re:Deleting hard drive (Score:2, Interesting)
If I had "rm -rf
wha?? (Score:2, Interesting)
To quote Lil' Flip "you don't know what I been through so don't judge me."
Re:May have been news May 23 of 2001... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IPv6 ruining all the fun? (Score:4, Interesting)
and for those "edumucated" leet hax0rs who have learned that 127.0.0.1 = loopback, just make it 127.92.36.148 or something.
leetwarez.somedomain.com -> 127.92.36.148
keep them script kiddies busy for days!