From: nikos (Nikos Mouat)
Subject: Internet from weird places (was: ping from 30,000 feet)
Reply-To: /dev/null
Organization: /dev/null 
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 14:18:57 GMT

In article <DERAADT.92Nov15141120@newt.newt.cuc.ab.ca>, deraadt@newt.cuc.ab.ca (Theo de Raadt) writes:
|> Re: sending mail from weird places.
|> 
|> This summer a few friends and I climbed Mount Shasta. I sent email
|> out of a Motorola "mail brick" thingy that one of the guys brought
|> along. So, you can count that as mail from 14,162 ft. Naturally, it
|> was very short piece of mail -- it was bloody cold.
    
     This doesn't really count, but in August, I was vacationing at my cabin 
on Saltspring Island, B.C., Canada. We have electricity and a phone... no hot
water or anything like that... Anyway, I was sitting on the porch, under a grape
vine, looking out over our lake, in the pleasant hot sun... on internet.
     It was actually no biggy.... my dad has DATAPAC access so it was
only a matter of a long distance call to the nearest DATAPAC node [on my dads
laptop], then a telnet from my dads account to my own... but the condradiction
was quite humorous... a computer geek in the sun, still being a computer geek.

nik.

|>  <tdr.
|> --
|> 
|> This space not left unintentionally unblank.		deraadt@newt.cuc.ab.ca

ObHack: This isn't really a hack, but I was impressed with myself by getting as
far as I did.
     At school, we have two [big] networks. The Engineering faculty has a 
IBM PC network, and the math/computer science faculty has a UNIX system up.
There are modem lines on the UNIX net, but the 7bit lines are always full, and
the 8 bit lines (and high speed lines) cost money. Being a poor and struggling
student, I didn't want to have to pay to dial in (and being a lazy student,
I didn't want to spend the 10 minutes to walk over to school). Now the PC network
is pretty flimsy, but they have two free modem lines. Having spent a year in
Engineering, I knew my way around the PC network fairly well, but it didn't have
a reliable FTP and the telnet was limitted to only other on campus nets 
(ie: the unix net). 
     Due to some small (and completely legal) hack at registration time, I
managed to get myself an account on the Engineering net. So usually I could dial 
into that network, telnet over to the UNIX net, and then I was free to email
and USENET to my hearts delight.
     Well, one day, during exams, at about 2:00am, It was absolutely imperitive
that I read my mail account before 8:00am, and I don't like to get up before
noon unless it's for money, or absolutely neccessary. So i dialed into the
engineering network, and tryed to log onto my account there... unfortunately,
the server I was on was down. Really not wanting to walk over to school at this
time of night (I just wanted to go to bed), I set my mind on getting into 
the network however I could. 
     The network had some 'scratch' accounts that you could use, but all it
was was this little menu program that enabled you to do 'whois', 'kickoff'
and a couple of other things.  (No DOS prompt, and no telnet). Well, it was
easy enough to do a couple of 'ctrl-c''s to get myself to a dos prompt. Then 
I tryed to telnet to the appropriate UNIX server, and I got the message
"You are not authorized to use TELNET". Not being detered the least, I 
decided to find the right programs and make them skip over the bit that told me 
I wasn't allowed to telnet. On PC networks, almost every thing is done through
batch files, and it's trivial to modify batch files.. so I ended up 
copying the appropriate batch files to my tempdir, modifying the appropriate lines
and tadah... telnet access... or so I thought... when I tried to telnet
across, the server just wouldn't connect... not being absolutely sure that
I completely hacked the telnet batch files (three levels deep), I decide to 
call a friend of mine who had an account on a different server, on the PC net.
So I got his password, and logged in, telneted and the same thing happened 
(No connection).
     So it turned out that my little 'crack' worked, but it wasn't my fault 
I couldn't get through (the UNIX side server was down) and I had to walk over
to school =-( 
     No, I don't think my actions were bad, because I did have 
authorization to telnet, but the server my account was on was down, so I feel 
I was justified.
     As an aside, I tried the same thing this term (I had to long distance call 
down to school), and they must have found out about the hole in security,
because the tempdir that you get for a scratch account is now read only, and it
doesn't run the standard login dos batchs (set path, prompt, and access dos disk).
This was easy to fix, just get a tempdisk, do a subst with your tempdir (the N:
you get at login) and then access the DOS disk, and setup the path appropriately.
It wasn't any harder, just took longer.

--
this post is flame proof
--
opinions are mine, not my employers.
Newsgroups: alt.hackers