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What was hacking like in the '80s and '90s? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 3 days ago by hellfire103@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I have somehow found myself doing a lighthearted talk on retro hacking this Wednesday. Would anyone here happen to know anything about it?

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[–] bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not really hacking, but in the 90s you could usually just connect to a mail server and it would believe what you told it.

If you were careful you could just type an email directly: MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, etc.

I would write scripts at work to send spoof emails sometimes, you could put anything as the FROM address, like "info @ catfacts" or whatever.

Another "not really hacking" example is that when some companies first got an Internet connection, they would just allocate public IP addresses to everyone, no gateway or firewall. So you could browse any non-passworded smb shares just knowing the IP.

[–] whoisearth@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's not hacking. Most languages have the ability to send mail from any mail address. Poweshell example -

Send-MailMessage -from bill.gates@microsoft.com -to you@yourmail.com -subject "fuck you" -body "no really fuck you"

[–] bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

My point was really how there was little to no verification on SMTP servers back then and that you could send mail with a simple terminal program, or, more practically, a script.

Not hacking, but using knowledge of the insecurity of SMTP servers of the time, to allow spoofing easy spoofing.

Not so easy to find SMTP servers to do that with now.