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The Planet's Most Moronic Hacker
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. "
That this is a hoax. It's simply not feasible.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I call my main work machine "localhost". Confuses the hell out of a surprising number of people and programs...:)
I think everyone who writes sploits should include a small quiz at the front. If the script kiddie is dumb enough to not know that 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address, they should not be allowed to run the sploit.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
I volunteer at a local high school helping a teacher explain introductory programming and interfacing using a Microchip PIC MCU. Last year, we had a kid that told us that he should just be given the credit because he was so good with computers.
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
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
$ dig warez.mcc.ac.uk
; <<>> 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
his computer is still running an IRC after half the hard drive is supposedly gone.
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.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Why does everyone always fall back to 127.0.0.1 when trying to mess with people? That whole 127 class is reserved for loopback.
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
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 and snipe hunts 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.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
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