hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2988.txt

Episode: 2988
Title: HPR2988: A tale of two hackers in the same system
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2988/hpr2988.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:21:41

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 2988 for Wednesday 15 January 2020.
Today's show is entitled, A Tale of Two Hackers in the Same System.
It is hosted by SIGFLOB
and is about nine minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summer is
Xhacking and Modem stuff. Quote-
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Music
Hello everyone. My name is SIGFLOB
and you are listening to another edition of Hacker Public Radio.
In this edition, I'll be talking about a tale.
A tale of two hackers in the same system should be fun.
Before I talk about it, though, I would like to have some housekeeping with some news.
Episode HPR Episode 2592
Tech Talk with Allison
Well, Allison is no longer with us.
She jumped off a bridge about a year ago
and it's all very sad.
And so, yeah, they're not with us anywhere.
They got cremated. I went to their, I guess, wake or whatever.
And I'm not, I'm not made of stone, right?
So I cried so fucking much during that period of time.
But now I'm kind of over it as long as I don't remember.
Remind myself of Fern and whatnot.
Anyway, that out of the way.
A tale of two hackers in the same system.
I went to the library.
I lived in Washington County in Minnesota when I was a kid.
And the library had these wise terminals like on tables all over the place.
I don't know, like maybe five wise terminals in the library.
And they were connected as it turns out to an AIX machine.
Excuse me.
AIX being IBM's Unix operating system as far as I know.
So, I talked to, I was talking, I brought this up with the library.
And I don't remember what I said exactly.
I knew this is before the popularity of AOL and and
Compuserve and Prodigy and those things.
But she's like, yeah, you can, you can dial into the, you can dial into our system
through the phone.
So, I think the system they used at the library.
It was called dial pack or something like that.
And so I dialed the, the modem number when I got home that she gave me.
And slow and behold, it just logs in a dial pack.
With, with one thing, you do have to log in with a user name and a password.
Both of which I was told just log in is library, library.
And that seems to work.
So, that's kind of neat.
I figured out later that you can run links from the dial pack thing.
And so that was cool.
Like going to, to websites text only.
For those of you who don't know links, it's a program Unix program that allows you to
browse websites with just text, text only.
So, yeah, so run links and there's this little thing about links you can press G.
And you can type in tell net colon slash slash and address.
And it will tell net to that address, which is pretty cool.
So, I heard about this, this service called grex.org, which has Unix shows.
And so I eventually like, I, I don't know how I got the account exactly,
but I had an account after a while.
And so I had this grex account, which is pretty neat.
I kind of think the thing about Unix back then, they had a couple of commands,
SX and RX, which sent X modem files, files through X modem.
Or we see files through X modem, which is pretty cool.
But yeah, those aren't, and on Unix anymore.
So, at least the major BSDs and the, the Linux distros.
So, yeah, so I played around with that for a while, and that was a lot of fun.
And then maybe a month later, I found out that this is misconfigured the IX machine.
If you just hang up and you call back, you will be at the same place you were when you hung up.
Like, the modem does not, the modem does not hang up into AX, A I X is,
IX is a perspective, but so, all right.
So, I, I teleted it to my grex account, and I wrote a little message,
and then I hung up the, the, the, the phone line, and I dialed right back.
And there I was in the same editor that I exited, and I can look over what I wrote, right?
So, that's pretty cool.
What I decided to do was to write a login simulator.
So, I would, um, side login, and I, I go, I connect to my grex account,
then I'd run in my login simulator.
So, the next person logs in, uh, just sees a login prompt, and, uh,
for their username and their password.
And I would have that information, because they're talking to me, and, um,
on this window, okay, there were most, mostly people are just dialing into the library,
with the library library username and password.
So, nothing special.
So, I decided to, um, port scan it for whatever reason.
I think this host's name is Washington.lib.mn.us.
I could be mistaken, but anyway, um, whoa, what was I saying?
Yeah, so I decided to port scan it for whatever reason.
And, uh, I found a root shell.
I'm one of the, I'm one of the ports.
And my, my immediate thought was, there's another hacker in here,
which is very possible, um, that another hacker left this behind.
So, that was awesome.
I, I logged in.
Uh, the very first thing I did was create another user account,
and, uh, puts, um, in iNATD, in the, the iNATD min configuration file on, in Etsy,
which I don't think there is there anymore.
I, I put, it's, it's, it's, it's, um, it's a system iNATD,
is a system where in which you can run programs in the standard day and in standard out,
are sent over the web.
So, so I had a running, uh, root shell from that.
So, I would, I, I put the root shell on another, another IP.
And I'm like, oh, this is awesome.
And so, I hung up and I, I connected to my port through, um, iNATD,
and it's, it, it was successful.
It worked.
And that only lasted for a week.
And then all the, the, uh, the, the, the shells disappeared.
My modifications to the configuration file disappeared.
My user that I added disappeared.
So that was sad.
But, um, yeah.
So that's my, my story.
It's, uh, six minutes, about seven minutes here.
Take care everyone.
Thank you for listening.
Bye-bye.
You've been listening to HackerPublic Radio as HackerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday
and Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute ring
to find out how easy it will be.
HackerPublic Radio was founded by the digital dog pound
and the infonanonicon computer club,
and is part of the binary revolution at bmf.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly,
leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a creative comments,
attribution, share-like, 3.0 license.