What specific factors do you take into account when you have to move somewhere else?
very frequently where the next train out of town is going.
Do you have any more stories of hacking/trolling in the early days of the internet similar to the MUD tale?
I miss it.
Me too man. It's hard to explain how good hacking was then, because exploits were still pretty new and there wasn't a market for them. If you wrote an exploit nobody would pay you for it, so the best thing you could do was give it to your friends and
use it. Nowadays, if you have 0day, you would just sell it. It's generally worth the price of a car, somewhere from a shitty clunker to a lambo depending on what the vuln is in. But in the late 90s, early 00s you could hang around EFnet, know some basic UNIX and people would hand you an undisclosed bug just because you were funny, and you could go root everything on the open Internet with it.
And I mean everything. Firstly, nobody had their shit firewalled. Major corporations and government agencies were giving individual workstations public IPs. Shit like some bullshit rpc.cmsd bug would mean you were in at virtually every major institution in the world. We would spend a couple days, portscan the whole Internet, and pop it all. Just for the sake of doing it, because why not.
Nowadays there would be nothing like that on the Internet. Even more terribly, there's IDS/IPS everywhere and you'd worry about someone capturing your usage of your 0day exploit and losing your insanely valuable thing. An exploit being "burned" by someone figuring it out means it'll get fixed and the exploit will no longer work and is no longer worth any money.
What did we do with this unprecedented level of access into all the world's computers? Mostly made botnets to DDoS one another off the Internet and steal ownership of IRC channels.
As well as dropping one another's private email correspondence to the EFnet viewing public.
Things will never be this great ever again, because the value of memory corruption exploits is too high to think about having fun with them. Certainly nobody will share their 0days with you for free-- you have to have a serious hack in the works that they expect to turn some good money. I still manage to make big lulz using nonvaluable weird web bugs, but few people have my talents. I'm not a billionaire, so I have sold a lot of bugs which probably could have been put to great use for the lulz. I regret every instance of this, but a guy's gotta eat.
Was Shanley Kane always as batshit nuts as she portrays herself online now?
Yes but she's actually more mentally ill than that.
