Ask HN: Did You Hack Something?

2 points by blankton 7 years ago | 1 comment

Hacker News leads to the assumption that we must be hackers. Did you actually illegally hack something/somebody? Or did you ever stumble across some security failure? I have never done it myself, but im curious to hear some storys. Pleas dont provide specific information for obvious reasons.

diavelguru 7 years ago |

Yes, doskey back when using DOS. I had to run multiple commands and found that doskey remembered what I typed. It was awesome. I could arrow up or down and get the long painful command that compiled my code or copied my files, etc. The problem was upon reboot doskey had no memory of what I did. I got curious and used disassembler to view the memory of doskey. Painfully I would add one simple command like dir to doskey and then inspect the memory looking for where that command lived in the memory and searching for the hex bytes. I found it rather quickly and wrote code to inject my own commands into doskey memory upon computer startup (us programmers are a lazy bunch!). Problem is it didn’t work! I went back to the good old disassembler and kept trying more. Meaning I added one then two commands manually. I happened to notice that a certain memory area changed as I added more and more commands for doskey to remember. That was my ahah moment! It was a count of the number of items that doskey had in memory and I was loading tens of commands but never updating the count. I modified my program to add my items, modified the count and low and behold I had doskey functioning with my pre-loaded commands! My life was set! I used this method for over two years until I upgraded and by then I could use the IDE properly and not have to use the command line as much. Am I a hacker? Yes at heart but not in practice. Anyone with curiosity is a hacker. Did I do anything more? No. I saw the power and realized the potential for abuse and never hacked anything again.