How did you hack, back in the old days?

Its used to be fun without any malicious intent.

Psychotherapist by day, naive bored script kiddie by night.

Working with subjective experiences all day, I needed some objective thought to create some balance for me.

I was a 50 year old classic script kiddie back in the mid 2000's.

I could write the most simplest of bash scripts and that was it.

I hacked all my neighbours wifi.

Wifi passwords were very poor, 6 digits or something as short. Rockyou.txt was the 135Mb go to password list or I used Crunch.

Even Aircrack-ng on an old cpu slowly crawled through your password lists.

Once you had hacked the wifi password you could watch the images with Wireshark that anyone on the local network was viewing, No HTTPS just HTTP back then.

The aircrack suite of tools were the most popular. No GPU's back then.

I used to download loads of SHA1, MD5 and NTLM hashes and try to crack as many as I could using hashcat and john on my first gaming rig.

I eventually built up a 12.5GB password file. Completely useless today.

I learned a great deal about Linux and other tools during this time:

All of the coreutils, sed, awk, curl, bash, grep, tr, sort etc and simple python2 scripting.

No Kali or ParrotOS or BlackArch back then.

Not hacking but similar enought.

In the '90 I worked in a high school, and I had two relevant projects:

I made the nibbles game run with two players, one in each computer. The program wrote the pressed keys in a shared Novel Netware folder. In the firts version I forgot to sync the initial PRNG, so we both were wining.

We had the internal Novel Netware message system and a used UUPC to send emails outside (if you know someone else outside). We wrote a program in QB to transfer the messages between both systems. We had to guess the format and the details. I think the program run only two or three times per day, so to get a reply you needed to wait like a full day.

As a young “Business Analyst” (1990s QA), when a defect was reported at Insurance Co, we had to make some guesses about what might be wrong and request a “scan” from the COBOL programmers, which returned output in the form of green-paper printouts of dozens of insurance policies with similar attributes with some policy values - this took about a week. I would then have to go through each line, pull out a physical rate tables book, and calculate what the policy values should be, going back and forth to a CICS 3270 terminal to get data for calculations and check stuff. If I found enough other policies with the same defect, I could either narrow down for a second scan or report the problem if I was confident.

As a new liberal arts college grad who wrote in basic on the 486, and knew everything, this was NONSENSE.

Network Security didn’t exist here, and neither did internet access. I found code for a Win32 netbios share scanner on some forum (Code-Something iirc), and smuggled it in on a CD with Borlands free C compiler to load on my Windows95 PC. Looking through every file in the building was how I spent free time that summer. One day I came across some huge binary files that looked important, which ended up being the Btrieve database daily backups (*.btr). They were fixed record binary encoded in some EBCDIC text thing (this took me a month to figure out) and I was able to write a small C program to dump them to CSV, which I imported into MSAccess and learned SQL in the process (and C, I guess).

Not only did I never need a scan again, but never needed to access the terminal and could write VBA to perform math. Instead of doing the mindless old process, I spent my time typing rate sheets into excel and completely automating my job. Of course I never told anyone. My next job was junior developer, somewhere else. I never did find any of the system code on that network, only some Delphi tooling. The programmers at least were security-minded.