The Discordant Opposition Journal Issue 10 - File 4
Miscellaneous Fiction
by Skratchnsnif
The stories which I write are fiction. The events which take place in them are completely made up, and any similarities to real life events is completely coincidental. However, these stories are designed to portray hacking as it really is. Not glamourous, fun, and colourful. These are stories of green/grey screen, text based, REAL hacking.
If just one newbie reads one of my stories and doesn't take up hacking, because he/she knows it's not cool, then my job will be a success. Where possible, I have paid every attention to true details. This ain't no Hackers movie.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Anthony breathed out laboriously. He set the syringe down on the desk beside him, rubbed his weary eyes, and stared at the clock. 3:17am. He tapped a few keys on his keyboard, and heard the harsh yet relieving noise of his modem and a distant modem negotiating their connection.
He waited for the chat script to finish negotiating his connection, blinking his eyes. Suddenly, a loud bang as the door burst a tiny bit open - stopped only by the security chain. Anthony quickly flicked the syringe into the open drawer below it, and slammed the drawer shut. An instant later, his mother burst in the door, having broken the security chain.
"You little bastard, how many times do I have to tell you, people should be asleep at this time. Then your deadbeat friend knocks on our fucking door!" She pushed Ben through the door somewhat heavy handidly, then slammed it behind her.
He could hear her through the door and walls. "Fucking kids. Stay up all night. See if I give a shit." He could still hear her walking back to bed.
"Dude, you loaded?" Anthony waved the syringe to Ben. "Yeah, man. I'm stoked."
Ben pulled the 486 laptop from his backpack, and set it on the table. He plugged his modem into a makeshift telephone jack, which Anthony had screwed to the wall. "So nice of your dad to lend me his fax line."
As Ben got set up, Anthony was already in action. He retrieved a list of open proxies on cable internet machines, scanned down the list and stopped at a random address. He telnetted to this address, before bouncing off it into another. Finally, he pulled out a separate sheet of paper, and entered the address from it.
He logged in to a box somewhere in Japan. Next, he used the su command to jump up to root privileges. A quick "who" on the system confirmed. No one awake except him.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
She stomped on the floor, climbing out of bed and storming across to the bathroom. "Bitch," Jayson muttered under his breath as he continued opening his laptop, still laying in bed. He scratched his chin, waiting for the machine to boot up. His hands smelt of her.
"You know," she began, flushing the toilet then stomping back into the bedroom.
"Only a fucking nerd would jump straight on the computer afterwards."
"You know where the door is," he replied, matter of factly. "Fuck you. I'm sick of your bitching."
"You know it's past curfew. I'd get picked up being out this time of night. Just put the fucking thing away and lets get some sleep. Is that so much to ask?" She lit a cigarette, and stood with authority at the end of the bed.
Jayson flicked the brightness down on the passive matrix screen, set the laptop on the bedside table, and rolled over. She climbed gently over the bed and lay down next to him.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Anthony dropped out of the root account, settling into his stolen user account. He loaded telnet, and made a connection from Japan to a telnet "talker" in the UK. He joined a hidden channel called "WatchTower", and found himself alone.
Moments later, the noise from Ben's carrier disappeared. He logged in, and bounced off his own set of WinGates, this time straight into the Talker.
--> XOR has joined WatchTower.
--> neb has joined WatchTower.
They waited, somewhat bored. Passing time. Wasting time.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"spyder" sat with a blunt in his mouth, squinting at his screen. It was 7 am, and he hadn't had any sleep. He really needed it, the lack of sleep and the effects of the smoke both taking their toll on his senses. The $ prompt sat staring at him, almost taunting him. You can't make me go away.
He desperately wanted this box. None he knew had access to this much bandwidth, and a super fast processor. He pondered about the speeds it would perform password cracking. He found himself sitting blankly, that $ prompt still staring at him.
He scanned the binaries directories for possibly exploitable programs. He needed to find something which would run suid root. He saw it. xfs. He'd remembered seeing an exploit for this, and wondered if it was currently running. Surely someone wouldn't be wasting a server as powerful as this by using it as an X workstation?
He ran ps ax, and saw it. It was running. The admin was an idiot. He knew this operating system version was vulnerable to this form of attack. Why didn't he just try cat the shadow file to begin with?
He typed ls -l /etc. There it was. Staring at him. Four days of racking his brain, and there it was, pointing and laughing...
-rwxrwxrwt 1 root root 544 Mar 30 00:04 /etc/shadow
He started his telnet logging, and cat'ed the shadow file, his fingers slightly trembling. The stopped logging, Wait, might as well grab group as well. He logged out, fully aware that the admin would be coming online within an hour.
spyder ftped the shadow file across to his linux machine, then opened a telnet session to it. He executed his password cracker.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
in southern australia, a beat-up bedford van slinked down a dark suburban street. it pulled over to the curb, the headlights extinguished, and the engine silenced. a late-teenage man climbed out of the van, and turned up his collar. he looked back, then to the front of the van, before grabbing a small chrome wrench and a coil of thin cable from the seat of the van.
he walked slowly through the dense undergrowth of a large bushy vacant lot, uncoiling the cable behind him as he went. he reached the other side of the lot, where he stopped at a tall green cylinder shaped object.
he took the wrench from his pocket, and inserted it into a hex shaped lock. he twisted the wrench a quarter of a turn, and the cylinder split open in half. he crouched down in front of it, and took a phone looking device from his pocket, with a length of cable and two "alligator clips" on the end of it.
he held the phone device, known as a "lineman's handset", on his shoulder with his head cocked, and touched the two clips onto two matching terminals inside the cylinder. he heard activity. he moved to the next. nothing. he removed two of the wires from the terminals with precision, and moved them to the side. next, he twisted the exposed ends of the cable he'd drawn from the van, and connected it to the terminals, before tightening the screws.
he moved briskly back to the van, looked forwards and backwards, before opening the door and climbing in. as he climbed to the back of the van, he already heard the engine of the van start, and a modem carrier squealing in the back. he climbed in and sat on a beanbag, watching lights flicker on a rackmounted server in a rack screwed to the wall of the van.
as the modem negotiated it's carrier, the two men and a young womam shuffled in their beanbag chairs, tapping away at their laptop keyboards.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Jayson climbed out of bed, secure in the knowledge that his girlfriend was sound asleep. He grabbed the laptop, a pack of cigarettes, and walked over to the couch. He flopped on the couch, opened the laptop, and lit a cigarette.
the laptop was already booted, so he opened his telnet client...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
haunting grunge music began playing inside the van, barely audible outside, as three hackers began attacking a large educational network in the US. they treaded lightly, but they weren't taking any chances. their call would be traced back to some person's house, and in this neighbourhood the owner of the line probably didn't even own a computer.
it was about 1 in the morning, and the isp they'd dialed into would be unmanned at this point. in the front of the van, another late teen man sitting in the driver's seat, scanned the view from the windshield and in the rear view mirrors.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
--> spyder has joined WatchTower
spyder> yo
spyder> guess who finally got the passwd file to that box?
neb> you mean the one you've been trying for like a month to crack?
neb> <G>
spyder> fuck you yo.. i only found it last week.
XOR> so are you crackin it or what?
spyder> what do you think?
XOR> want me to crack it on this gook box?
XOR> prolly be faster than that tin can you call a linux machine.
ned> haha.. win32 john the ripper all the way baby...
spyder> i think i'll keep the passwd file...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
the three Australian hackers continued attacking the network until early in the morning. it was a game, which one would find their way in first? would any of them breach the network? or would they go home empty handed?
the female of the trio - "lil`devil" - stretched her face muscles, battling to stay awake. she flicked her tongue-stud out and held it in her lips, toying with it. the amphetamines were wearing off, and she knew she'd be asleep soon.
she switched windows to her ATerm, which was running a perl script of her own invention, which attempted to crack arbitrary accounts on the server using brute force. it had been running on a remote shell for nearly 4 hours. the sun was beginning to come up.
"f1sh", the older of the male hackers was also feeling the effects of his body's reaction to the speed wearing off. he tilted his head back, shut his eyes, and for a minute, almost fell asleep.
lil`devil bit her lip. her cracker's ATerm was blinking. visual alert. it had beeped. it only beeps for one reason. the cracking program had forcibly cracked the password to a user account, "denverp". peter denver, an admin on the network. the trio were reliably informed that he would have trusted privileges on the network.
"yes" she breathed quietly. the others didn't hear her over beating music, but she knew she'd cracked it. unfortunately, they would have to work together, exploit the privileges (if they existed), and clear up the logs before denverp logged in. the next day was a Saturday, it was doubtful he'd log in, but the possibility was there, and it was real. time was of the essence.
she raised both hands in the air. the stereo silenced. "i got it, i got denverp. now let's find those trusted hosts", she gave them both the password, and they checked host after host. what they were looking for was a trusted host which they could log into easily, but with less security than the well guarded firewall machine.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
<-- spyder has left the channel
--> spyder has joined the channel
spyder> damn
neb> what happened?
spyder> no clue, connection timed out.. freaky yo
neb> yo yo yo if i hear you say yo once more....
XOR> i'm bored. i need something new. wonder if dad'll get me a sparc for xmas
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
f1sh scratched his goatee, lil`devil continued playing with her tongue stud. the first hacker, "spud" continued typing, and waiting, typing and waiting. he compiled an exploit, tried it, it failed, so he deleted it.
this continued on for quite some time. finally spud's heart skipped a beat, and his lungs stopped in his chest. there it was staring at him, a # prompt. he'd managed to get root on this box. as a reliable contact had promised, the rest of the machines on the network trusted the root user from all the other machines.
the hackers were free to login as root on any of the machines. he picked a machine on the network which he figured would have the least chance of denver logging in. he changed the root password, then relayed the information to his buddies.
now begins the final part of the operation. the cleanup. f1sh installed rootkits on all the machines, a utility which hides obvious evidence of a root compromise. spud and lil`devil spent their time racing around the servers clearing out their entries from the wtmp files and their relatives. they just generally removed any evidence of their attacks (including the sizeable logs generated by her brute force cracker).
spud also installed a module in the apache server, of his own design. it was designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, but it allowed certain urls to be sent to the server and allow him to run arbitrary commands as the httpd user. next, he set up a small exploit program which the server could run, but it would use root privileges, to enable them to retake the server at any time should they be discovered.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Jayson was quickly growing bored. He decided to try telnetting to f1sh's "0wned box" in the UK, and see if he was around. He did so, and sure enough, f1sh was on. He tried to "talk" him. No answer. f1sh wasn't dumb enough to leave himself connected overnight.
He tried again, and again. Still no answer.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The trio were just finished up the clean up operation, when several plain Mitsubishi sedans zipped past, jerking the driver of the van awake. He looked in the rear view mirror and saw the cars all swerve around the corner two blocks down.
"Heads up," he said. Three plain cars just flew past. I think someone's onto us.
The three hackers made their final clean up attempts, before logging off. They powered down the server, cut the cable hanging out the door, and just generally put everything away. The van pulled slowly away from the curb, accelerating away.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Jayson sighed. f1sh had gone offline. He closed his laptop, walked over to the bed and climbed back in. His companion groaned slightly in her sleep, before rolling over and wrapping her arm around him. He fell asleep pretty soon.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The three unmarked police cars crawled to a halt in a poorly lit dusk street. The officers climbed out of their cars, and walked speedily two houses along before climbing the steps of a decrepit house.
On an under-breath count of three, the officers kicked the old flimsy wooden door off it's hinges, and burst into the house yelling "freeze" and "police" repeatedly. They found... An elderly lady sitting watching early morning television. She stared at the officers, stunned. Their comrades searched every room in the house. Nothing.
They simply stood around scratching their heads. Hackers 1, Cops 0.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is as far as I'm going this issue, fwaggle's nagging me for this text. I'll probably continue this tomorrow, and you'll hopefully see the results next issue!
Have fun, and keep it real.
Dr Skratchnsnif
