HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Subject: Re: Attempted post
Reply-To: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Organization: SCI Systems, Inc., Huntsville, Al.
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 17:46:01 GMT

In article <141238@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> sterne@dublin.llnl.gov (Philip Sterne) writes:

>ObHack:	Using dd to salvage as much as I could from a disk whose
>      	superblock was clobbered in a power outage. 

I had a similar situation arise once; the superblock on a systems' root
drive developed a soft error. After fighting with it for a while (fsck 
wouldn't work nothing could read the sector, etc.), I finally came up
with a fairly nifty fix:

	Moved the damaged drive to the second position;

	Installed another drive of identical type (handy to have those
		around!) in the first position;

	Did a core install onto the new drive;

	Used dd to read off the corresponding sector from the raw device
		of the new drive, and write it to the damaged one.

	Poof! The superblock was now readable, but dirty.

Then, fsck would work; after a couple passes over the drive (on those 
systems, I learned to run fsck until I got at least two consecutive
error-free passes before believing it), I shut down, moved the old drive
back to the first position, and it booted fine.

The system belonged to a documentation asshole (moved the system in his
office to keep control over it, but put his printer in the lab so he
wouldn't be bothered by the noise--I know not all doc people are like
that), who, of course, hadn't backed it up in months. He was the kind
that we celebrated his departure....


-- 
Gary Heston    SCI Systems, Inc.  gary@sci34hub.sci.com   site admin
The Chairman of the Board and the CFO speak for SCI. I'm neither.
"Data sheet: HSN-3000 Nuclear Event Detector. The [NED] senses the gamma
radiation pulse [from a] nuclear weapon." As if we wouldn't notice...
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal)
Subject: Re: Two hackers caught tapping into Boeing, federal computers
Followup-To: alt.snackers
Date: 13 Nov 92 22:11:41 GMT

>mdw@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU (Matt Welsh) writes:
>>My question is this:
>>how'd they decrypt the passwords (as the following claims)?
>
mrhoten@cs.stanford.edu (Matthew Rhoten) writes:
>Perhaps the article is inaccurate (as so many media articles about
>computing are), and our wayward cracker merely used the dictionary
>technique and got lucky with the root password?

The dictionary technique is a method of decrypting, albeit a hit-and-miss one.
"Decrypting" is going from encrypted text to plain text, by whatever means.
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: hopkins@cs.cmu.edu (Don Hopkins)
Subject: Re: (none)
Originator: hopkins@ECP.GARNET.CS.CMU.EDU
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 14:11:14 GMT

Jimbo, you're weird!

	-Don
From: chess@watson.ibm.com (David M. Chess)
Date: 06 Nov 92 14:01:26 EDT
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: decode

I'm sure this has been done j-zillion times before, but it was
easier (and more relaxing) to Just Do It than to find someone
else's code.  So don't flame me on that!   *8)

I get lots of uuencoded and xxdecoded things that come to me as
mail on my CMS account.  I would manually look to see which coding
was used, decode the uu things in CMS with a utility someone wrote
and download them to my PS/2 (the eventual destination), and download
and then decode the xx things (because I had an xxdecode for DOS that
I could run in the OS/2 DOS box).  I would also take the non-coded
parts of the notes (often the only clues as to what the coded parts
were supposed to be), and save them away as well.  Actually, I would
generally put the notes aside for days or weeks, because the above
was too much work, and eventually get around to them only when
lots of guilt had accumulated.  No fun!

So in need of a minor hack anyway for karmic cleansing purposes,
I wrote a small thing in reasonably portable C that finds a
likely "begin" line, uses the obvious h/M heuristic to figure out
which encoding is in use, and does the decoding.  If asked nicely
via a switch, it also saves away the non-coded parts of the note
in a side-file under another name.  So now I can do the whole bit
under OS/2 (or whatever).

This post itself is the usual maiden-posting hack, probably
somewhat different than the usual one, in that I'm on the
other side of several gateways and posting from CMS.  I
couldn't just torture postnews slightly; I had to actually
learn SMTP.  Must have taken several *minutes*!   *8)

- -- -
David M. Chess                     \    Femmes aux tetes de fleurs
High Integrity Computing Lab       \     retrouvant sur la plage la
IBM Watson Research                \     depouille d'un piano a queue
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: pc123@cus.cam.ac.uk (Pete Chown)
Subject: Re: Inside Macintosh
Organization: U of Cambridge, England
	<1992Nov13.034403.4191@tc.cornell.edu>
	<mrhoten.721632407@Xenon.Stanford.EDU>
	<13NOV199200372518@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 19:57:58 GMT

In article <13NOV199200372518@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu> 9999sc01@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu (Alexandre Khalil) writes:

[ stuff about mounting lights on a copy of Inside Macintosh deleted ]

     I don't know about the hardback book, but I could sure use the Inside
   Macintoshs.
     Would you mind exchanging those for an equivalent weight of phone 
   directories ? I will most readily pay for the mailing of the Mac 
   documentation.

I thought this was alt.hackers, and now we have people posting about
Macintoshes...

If anyone's got a copy of the Power User's Guide to Wordperfect please
would they exchange it for a copy of the Cambridge telephone directory
(it's much more useful apart form anything).  :-) :-)

ObHack: I recently had a good idea - why not write my parser in C++?
Then each node of the parse tree inherits a class called "node", and
knows how to flatten itself.  So then after the tree is generated,
instead of having to traverse the tree with a recursive procedure
containing a humungous great case statement to deal with each class of
node, I just tell the first node to flatten itself.  Then it flattens
its descendants, because it needs to do that in order to flatten
itself.

Unfortunately flex doesn't allow you to specify any code to be
included right at the beginning of the generated lexical analyser.
This is a problem since C++ expects prototypes for everything... so my
Makefile now contains:

echo '#include "compile.h"' >lang.lex.c
cat lex.yy.c >>lang.lex.c
rm -f lex.yy.c

which is an ugly enough hack I am sure...
--
---------------------------------------------+ "A tight hat can be stretched.
Pete Chown, pc123@phx.cam.ac.uk (Internet)   |  First damp the head with steam
            pc123@uk.ac.cam.phx (Janet :-)  -+  from a boiling kettle."
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: mhunt
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Decifer it (if you can)
Date: 5 Nov 92 19:57:46 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: Somewhat Lacking
NNTP-Posting-Host: roche.csl.sri.com
Originator: mhunt@csl.sri.com


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Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: wcsjc@alfred.carleton.ca (John Coughlin)
Subject: test
Keywords: attempt to post
Organization: Chateauneuf du Squicke
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 17:05:30 GMT

ObHack: This post.
-- 
Flesh: John Coughlin                            Elvis ate my Cadillac
Net: wcsjc@ccs.carleton.ca     Vox: +1 613 957-2851     Fax: 990-7370
From: sterne@dublin.llnl.gov (Philip Sterne)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Attempted post
Date: 12 Nov 92 01:04:48 GMT
Reply-To: sterne@dublin.llnl.gov (Philip Sterne)
Organization: University of California, Davis

I've been reading this group for a while now.... about time I
tried a post.

ObHack:	Using dd to salvage as much as I could from a disk whose
      	superblock was clobbered in a power outage.  That was in 
	days when we only had a TK50 for backups and we were young
	and indestructible.  Wading through the disk playing jigsaw
	puzzle games with the ASCII files ages you fast!
--
Philip Sterne 				|    sterne@dublin.llnl.gov
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: joshua@rtfm.mlb.fl.us (Joshua Geller)
Subject: Re: Is it really possible to post anonymously?
Organization: Institute for the Study of Ancient Science
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 10:29:16 GMT

asu@panther4.panther.mot.com (Russ Trotter) writes:

>Hello,
>  I know somebody here has got to know this one...but...is
>it really possible to post anonymously...untraceable?

yes.

>Is this just a pipe dream?

no.

josh


Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: mdw@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU (Matt Welsh)
Subject: Re: Two hackers caught tapping into Boeing, federal computers
Organization: Cornell Theory Center
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 03:44:03 GMT

The following was found in comp.security.misc. My question is this: how'd
they decrypt the passwords (as the following claims)? Perhaps the encryption
was less secure than our trusty DNS...

>If anybody out there has any technical information about this, please
>comment.  The UPI story uses the terms "root" which suggests that a
>unix operating system may have been involved.
>
>Does anybody know what operating systems were involved, and in general
>terms, what methods were used to break in?
>
>UPI writes:
>>
>>	SEATTLE (UPI) -- U.S. attorneys late Tuesday arrested and charged two
>>young men with ``hacking'' their way into computer systems operated by
>>Boeing, the U.S. District Court and the Environmental Protection Agency
>>offices in Seattle.
>>	Arrested were Charles M. Anderson, 19, a University of Washington
>>student, and Costa George Katsaniotis, 21, of Seattle. Both were charged
>>with fraud against the government, which carries a maximum penalty of a
>>$10,000 fine and and five years in prison. The two were ordered to
>>appear before a U.S. magistrate on Monday.
>>	FBI Special Agent said espionage was not behind the unauthorized
>>systems entries. Rather, he said, the two were motivated by the
>>challenge or thrill factor involved, known among hackers as ``network
>>navigating.''
>>	A complaint filed in federal court charges that Anderrson and
>>Katsaniotis gained access to the District Court computer by using a home
>>computer to scan for telephone modem numbers. Modems are used to send
>>data from one computer to another over telephone lines. 
>>	``Once the system was accessed, Anderson copied the file containing
>>the passwords controlling access to the computer system,'' an affidavit
>>filed with the charges stated. ``He then transferred the password file
>>to a Boeing Company computer, where he decrypted the passwords.''
>>	That process gave Anderson the ``root'' password, which allowed him
>>to have unrestricted access to the computer system at the courthouse,
>>the affidavit said. Once inside, it said, ``the hackers were able to
>>view numerous confidential records, including some grand jury material.''
>>	Following the arrests, Boeing issued a statement saying it ``fully
>>supports'' the FBI's investigation. Boeing alerted the FBI after the
>>company determined someone had gained unauthorized access, then aided
>>the investigation.
>>	``Intrusion was limited due to effective security systems being in
>>place, and no government-classified systems were entered,'' Boeing said.
>>	Boeing also said that, based on its preliminary investigation, no
>>company systems or data were damaged by the unauthorized access.

mdw
From: tim@crash.canon.co.uk
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: lucky : -)
Date: 12 Nov 92 14:10:38 GMT
Organization: me myself and i

pmiach@ee.mu.OZ.AU (Paul Miach) writes:
:
|'Command not found', so I had effectivly lost /bin. Jumped into /usr/bin (only
|other place with binaries). /usr/bin was still there, intact :-).

I take it you weren't on a Sun.

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root     daemon          7 Mar  9  1992 /bin -> usr/bin

Tx. [neat hack though]
-- 
Tim F O'Donoghue <tim@crash.canon.co.uk> <uunet!canon!tim>
From: hassan@cs.ubc.ca (Moustafa Hassan)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Magic constants
Date: 10 Nov 1992 01:10:19 -0800
Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
NNTP-Posting-Host: maximus.cs.ubc.ca
Summary: Help!

I'm trying to port code (not sure which unix system it was originally
for) to a SPARC 2 (System V).  The code I have uses the <sys/quota.h>
which I had to change to <ufs/quota.h> on the sparcs, but I'm still
getting unknown constant errors.  The constants that are causing 
problems are:

Q_SETUID
Q_DOWARN
UT_NAMESIZE

The first two are used as the first argument to quota().  To make my
problems worse, I can't find any manual entries for the quota() C 
function call.  UT_NAMESIZE is merely used as a constant for defining
the size of an array and incrementing a pointer.  If you have any clue
what these values should be, please let me know.  Thanks.

ObTinyHack: Sending anonymous mail to one of my professors to complain about
            the unethical conduct of some TA's (ya, I'm an undergrad).
            Alas, an ethically pleasing hack... 8^)

Cheers,
********************************************************************
* Moustafa Hassan          |                                       *
* hassan@cs.ubc.ca         |  Political correctness is a euphemism *  
* TEL/FAX: (604) 535-2826  |  for intellectual stagnation.         *
********************************************************************
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: ratinox@splinter.coe.northeastern.edu (Richard Pieri)
Subject: Re: Attempted post
X-Posting-Software: GNUS 3.14.1 [ NNTP-based News Reader for GNU Emacs ]
Reply-To: ratinox@meceng.coe.northeastern.edu
X-Signature-Virus-Protection: Version 1.51
X-Get-A-Clue: Have two, they're small.
Organization: 3WA, Boston Office. Or Nu Meta Chi. Take your pick.
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 02:10:16 GMT

>>>>> In article <141238@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>, sterne@dublin.llnl.gov
>>>>> (Philip Sterne) writes:

PS> ObHack: Using dd to salvage as much as I could from a disk whose
PS> superblock was clobbered in a power outage.  That was in days when
PS> we only had a TK50 for backups and we were young and
PS> indestructible.  Wading through the disk playing jigsaw puzzle
PS> games with the ASCII files ages you fast!

I've done similar stuff on my old Apple ][. It's lots of fun when the
directory track dies and you're down to searching for track/sector
lists, trying to piecemeal files back together on a new disk with a
sector editor, then building a new directory from scratch.

--Rat
||||| | | | |  |  |  |   |   |    |    |    |   |   |  |  |  |  | | | | | |||||
Northeastern's Stainless Steel Rat          ratinox@meceng.coe.northeastern.edu
The only way to deal with temptation is to yield to it.           --Oscar Wilde
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: Ivan_Awfulitch@Scratchy.com
Subject: Re: Is it really possible to post anonymously?
Followup-To: alt.hackers
Organization: anonymous fun
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1992 07:03:51 GMT

In article <kg9TTB2w165w@anon.o.mous>, hopefully@anon.o.mous wrote:
> 
> asu@panther4.panther.mot.com (Russ Trotter) writes:
> 
> > Hello,
> >   I know somebody here has got to know this one...but...is
> > it really possible to post anonymously...untraceable?
> > Is this just a pipe dream?
> >  
> I think so.  I'm going to attempt it right now.  Note, the signature
> is there on purpose...  (in case it works, and/or to see what happens)
> 
> Greg

Greg,
You're in luck! It did work...

--
ObHack:

Make a phonetical spell checker and give it to someone the day before they
hand in their thesis.
Xref: sparky alt.hackers:1636 comp.org.eff.talk:6888 alt.security:4788 comp.security.misc:1695
From: nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers,comp.org.eff.talk,alt.security,comp.security.misc
Subject: Help write a hacker story
Date: 9 Nov 92 23:40:38 GMT
Article-I.D.: reed.1992Nov9.234038.17956
Reply-To: nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar)
Distribution: pnw
Organization: Reed College, Portland, OR

A freelance reporter here in Portland, Oregon is interested in doing a
human interest story on people who crack system security. He wants to
talk (anonymously) to people who hack into systems and write a story
about what such people are like.

He said he really wants to talk to people from the Pacific Northwest
(I guess to give the story a regional flavour?). He gave as a
reference a story he wrote about graffiti taggers. It's in the
Oregonian 3/15/92, in the Arts section.

He seemed friendly and open minded, so I thought it would be
worthwhile to help him find people. If you are interested in talking
to him, call Bill Donahue at 503-254-5315.

                __
nelson@reed.edu \/              Death needs time for what it kills to grow in
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: crawford@boole.mitre.org (Randy Crawford)
Subject: Re: Two hackers caught tapping into Boeing, federal computers
Originator: crawford@boole.mitre.org
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 19:20:40 GMT


In article <1992Nov13.034403.4191@tc.cornell.edu>, mdw@theory.TC.Cornell.EDU (Matt Welsh) writes:
> The following was found in comp.security.misc. My question is this: how'd
> they decrypt the passwords (as the following claims)? Perhaps the encryption
> was less secure than our trusty DNS...
> 
> >If anybody out there has any technical information about this, please
> >comment.  The UPI story uses the terms "root" which suggests that a
> >unix operating system may have been involved.

That's my bet.  It also refers to a publicly readable "password file" which 
also sounds like Unix.

> 
> >Does anybody know what operating systems were involved, and in general
> >terms, what methods were used to break in?
> >
> >UPI writes:
[...] 
> >>	``Once the system was accessed, Anderson copied the file containing
> >>the passwords controlling access to the computer system,'' an affidavit
> >>filed with the charges stated. ``He then transferred the password file
> >>to a Boeing Company computer, where he decrypted the passwords.''
> >>	That process gave Anderson the ``root'' password, which allowed him
> >>to have unrestricted access to the computer system at the courthouse,
> >>the affidavit said. 
[...]

These two were 19 and 20 years old, right?  It's highly unlikely that they'd 
broken the standard Unix non-DES crypt(3), since no closed form decrypt has 
been openly reported.  It's MUCH more likely that the sysadmin on that system 
was incompetent enough to choose a root password which is found in an on-line 
wordlist (like /usr/lib/spell or /usr/dict).  It's pretty trivial to generate-
and-test for such passwords.

Without a doubt, the U.S. District Court and the EPA are partly to blame for
the violation.

--
Randy
crawford@mitre.org
-- 

| Randy Crawford        crawford@mitre.org        The MITRE Corporation
|                                                 7525 Colshire Dr., MS Z421
| N=1 -> P=NP           703 883-7940              McLean, VA  22102
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: 9999sc01@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu (Alexandre Khalil)
Subject: Inside Macintosh, was Re: Two hackers caught tapping into Boeing
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41A   
Organization: University of Houston-Downtown
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 05:37:00 GMT

In article <mrhoten.721632407@Xenon.Stanford.EDU>, mrhoten@cs.stanford.edu (Matthew Rhoten) writes...

>ObHack: (remember these?)  So I just bought a lamp, the kind that
>comes with a sleeve for possible insertion into a hole in a desk, but
>with a hole in it so it can fit over a bolt from enclosed mounting
>bracket. I then realized that the place I really wanted to put it was
>up on top of my closet (really a sort of chifforobe affair), the
>better to illuminate my lofted bed. There's no hole in the top of my
>closet, and I can't really put one there without disturbing the folks
>who own it. Nor is there a place on the top of the closet suitable for
>the mounting bracket. So, I grabbed some volumes of Inside Mac, a
>hardback book I didn't really care about,

  I don't know about the hardback book, but I could sure use the Inside
Macintoshs.
  Would you mind exchanging those for an equivalent weight of phone 
directories ? I will most readily pay for the mailing of the Mac 
documentation.

>					   attached mounting bracket to
>the hardback, put it up on some other lying-around books, stacked the
>IMs on it, and, viola! I was in alto clef, with a reasonably stable
>lamp clamped to a big stack o' books on top of the closet.
> 
>Hey, no hack too small :)
> 
> -matt
>-- 
>Matthew Rhoten | mrhoten@cs.stanford.edu | m_rhoten@leland.stanford.edu
>"When Adam and Eve first saw each other, that's when the blues started."
> -John Lee Hooker

  Regards

alex khalil  alex@dt.uh.edu
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: tspindle@lynx.dac.northeastern.edu (tom spindler)
Subject: Re: Attempted post
Organization: Northea$tern University, Boston, MA. 02115, USA
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 06:23:10 GMT

>PS> ObHack: Using dd to salvage as much as I could from a disk whose
>PS> superblock was clobbered in a power outage.  That was in days when
>PS> we only had a TK50 for backups and we were young and
>PS> indestructible.  Wading through the disk playing jigsaw puzzle
>PS> games with the ASCII files ages you fast!
>
>I've done similar stuff on my old Apple ][. It's lots of fun when the
>directory track dies and you're down to searching for track/sector
>lists, trying to piecemeal files back together on a new disk with a
>sector editor, then building a new directory from scratch.

Aw, but if you have the T/S lists intact, that makes things pathetically
easy. Not hard at all.

ObHack: on said Apple II, modifying RWTS to read in sectors that had
been written with the wrong skew pattern but write them out normally.
From: mlewis@cssnet.wplace.UUCP (Mark Lewis)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Decifer it (if you can)
Date: 11 Nov 92 13:46:54 GMT
Organization: The Waffle House, Waldo's Place USA

jsteiner@anwsun.phya.utoledo.edu (jason 'Think!' steiner) writes:
> mhunt writes:
> >
> > -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
>  [PGP block munched]
> > -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
> using off the shelf software hardly counts as a hack.

ahhhh.... but the Hack is decrypting it... it appears that it is encrypted
with a public key and is destined for one specific private key...

ObHack: sorry, still working on it -=B-) 

)\/(ark


<--------------------------------------------------------------------------->
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