Torrenting and child porn, I would guess. I remember the slow transition from people using open networks to securing the shit out of them, and there was this big fear that someone could use your network to download copyright-protected and/or illegal material, and it would be tied to your IP.
It all seems like a fuzzy memory now. My exposure to warez started with BBS then migrated to IRC/FTP. As a teenager during this time I remember how many enterprise networks were easily compromised. Seeing this from the outside, I just figured that security wasn’t important to them — or they didn’t know how to manage their security.
I wonder if that was really the case in the early internet at an enterprise level. Did security take a backseat to functionality?
Oh, unencrypted data was an even bigger issue back then. I remember still having ethernet hubs at the time and watchin the data go to and from my buddies computer on the our network.
Thanks for explaining. That last thing — yes that sounds uncomfortable to think about.
Hmm network cables, decades ago — I suppose that back then, hacking over the Internet wasn't really a thing, (?) so I suppose that wasn't much of an issue. Or maybe it was a local network only (for backup)
Chilling effects of the "nothing to hide" era. People were being allowed to be sued based on IP, so a lot of people just stopped using the net for normal human things.
The revelations of domestic spying made it obvious how much collusion and voluntary cooperation was going on between the military, federal and local governments, law enforcement, and corporations, and how much people feared the state of unequal information dominance.
It wasn't just the '80s. Things persisted into the mid '90s as well.
- Pirate FTP sites were in plain sight with folders named with unprintable ASCII characters
- My college-provided Telnet client for Windows included a backdoor FTP server with a plaintext user name and easily brute-forced password (unsalted hash that turned out to be a birthday of a school admin)
- Admins had to resolve our network issues by connecting to network via modem, from our computers. Of course terminal program had keylogging enabled...
- Open SMTP relay was widespread and everywhere. Spoofing and forging was as easy as a little Telnet and HELO
I remember a time when you had to be careful to not reveal your IP address to untrusted peers (e.g. on IRC) because a single specially malformed packet called the "Ping of Death" would reliably crash any internet-connected Windows PC.
That was a wild time. Nobody talked about security back then. The idea that everything in our lives would eventually run over the internet just wasn't on people's minds.
Use of telecom networks for criminal activities predates the Internet, and the use of computer networking for fraud and abuse was recognized long before the Internet was opened for commercial use. The movie War Games was released in '83 around the already popular meme of computer hacking. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was passed in '86. The Morris Worm occurred in '88.
Usenet started in '80 and soon had all sorts of sketchy activity going on. Corporate email systems in the mid-80s were being used for flame wars over internal disputes. It was clear by then that computer networking allowed all the good and bad human interactions that were possible.
Those times, end of the 90's, was basically wild west. Many uneducated people fresh on the internet, netbus just recently available, news users would install anything you ask them...
I would call that real hacking but kiddies at the time had a lot of fun creating problems to the new netizens.
I was involved in the warez scene as a cracker and a trader around the turn of the century. In a way it was a fun scene with groups that had strict hierarchies as in companies, the community aspect was strong, you could earn fame if you worked hard enough for it and had the skill, which was all pretty fascinating for us youngsters spending their nights in front of their PCs. In hindsight though, it was flatout stupid to participate in illegal activities over unencrypted IRC channels and FTP sites located at universities with hundreds of users. There were bouncers/tcp-tunnels and stuff, but many didn't care to use them. Things got scary when some of my affiliates got busted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Buccaneer. Thankfully I got out without getting my ass burned.
This was very common with public libraries, I think. It was the same around here, around 1993 - 1996. Security in the earlier days of the Internet was pretty loose.
But also black-hat hackers, spammers and all sorts of other nefarious sorts making a lot of the openness that was possible in the 80s and early 90s much less practical.
Everything was unencrypted until late 90s (and in many cases until late 00s). Email (both smtp and pop3/imap), irc, web, gopher, telnet, ftp, local disks, removable storage, network storage (smb/nfs etc), everything. Computing and the internet was much nicer place, there wasn't such an adversial attitude where everything would be broken just because its out there like today.
I loved the early internet, IRC, newsgroups etc. The really old school phreakers even before that was also a different time. Back then you could do stuff like that and go on to start companies like Apple (Woz). Now, you'll end up in a solitary confined cell or have to join the FBI/NSA if you are caught.
Hacker groups aren't as tied to freedom as it used to feel.
… When computers didn’t all have permanent internet connections, which limited the damage it was possible to do by having a persistent executable running on someone’s computer.
There was little to no spyware or malware risk because this was a time when stealing CPU cycles couldn’t make you money, machines couldn’t be used to anonymously generate internet traffic, and exfiltrating captured data was essentially impossible.
As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.
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