I remember this - and using the same CD opening closing joke on people in the college lab. The technicians had no idea what was going on. I don’t think they really knew anything about computers - we once found a word doc on one of the computers with every password for the entire college / website etc.
Did this to my Computer Programming teacher in high-school while he sat in the other room and we could watch him visibly confused. Probably the most vivid memory I h ave from high-school.
A former "friend" of mine in high school deleted my documents including due school work with netbus or BO (don't remember which one). It really was a shitty thing to do and he was proud of it that I lost weeks of work.
I got revenge couple of months later with a "screensaver" that I've made in Delphi. In reality it would just "crash" with some random error, but actually copy itself on multiple places on the hard drive with windows sounding names, run both as a service and some innocent sounding files etc. It wouldn't show up in task manager. I could send and execute whatever commands I liked. I've deleted his Diablo saves a week later or so, and man he was livid as he wasted months playing. He had no idea what happened as he had two AV programs installed and he was confident it would detect a trojan.
Windows security at that period of time really was a contradiction in terms.
> “ However, use of NetBus has had serious consequences. In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.”
I remember packing jpegs with sub7 payloads and sending to my friends on AIM. The opening and closing on the CD tray is such a classic prank. Best part was that given I was usually the guy my friends and their parents called to fix their computer trouble, I was getting IMs from all of them saying “my cd tray keeps opening and closing”. The reveal of the prank was great except for when I must have done it for like 3 hours while my friend’s mom was using the family computer. She wasn’t very happy with me.
The most fun I had with Sub7 (or maybe it was Netbus?) was opening the CD-ROM drives of computers in the computer lab and watching people's reactions. Good times....
Sub7 was a lot of fun. So many options. I will add to the computer lab anecdotes. I gave this to my buddies at school who were in the same crew(we mostly made VB 'proggies' for AOL,) but of course two of them install it in the library computer lab. I told them it's not illegal to have but is to use. They mess with students even doing things like deleting essays being written. The IT people figure it out and my buddies get arrested and cut ties. They are expelled for a whole year and when they come back can't use any school computers. Did anyone ever figure out if there was a backdoor in the backdoor from the maker?
But that kind of stuff is what got me interested in computers and programming back in junior high. Learned the basics of control statements and OOP in a fun engaging way. I made an AOL chatroom mailserver with sendkeys :D and later became more advanced using APIs. These were very much like mIRC but AOL hosted all the files so even better. There were private chatrooms based on just making these things and prewritten libraries floating around. Who remembers genocide.bas?(hey I didn't name it) Anybody have these? I have copies somewhere on a zip drive.
Remember punters? In dialup days you could flood a person with chat messages containing html heading tags that would slow them down rendering to the point they could never catch up. Others eventually found exploits that could crash the app on one message.
The Trojans for AOL were also pretty good. Would capture the password field and once connected open an email in the background and send it wherever, then delete sent. Back then though you could as easily just say you are an admin and ask someone for their password. Your whole neighborhood probably openly sharing through netbeui.
I think it's long enough ago to say I ran an FTP on mirc and the password was like the 5th word on the xdrive free account confirmation page. They started at $2 a referral and I bought a nice 17" ViewSonic monitor to play Quake on in the 8th grade. Other friends bought whole computers. Shut that down when the FTP got hacked and I got a cease and desist letter for 3d studio max, thought the law was coming to break down my door. After that I mellowed out.
