Friday, April 26, 2013

Thanks for Hacking Me!!!

Dear "Hacker" from Brazil,

     I wanted to thank you for hacking my Redhat box in 2000 via a vulnerability with wuftpd. At the time I was very angry with you and I felt violated. I also want to thank you for not covering your tracks very well. What pisses me off is I was doing a remote install and I had to start it all over again once you owned it. I was excited when I was about to leave for work that day since the install had just finished from running over night and I rebooted the box and tested the remote login. I was going to finish up what I was doing when I got to the office. 

     You see I was taken aback when I tried to connect from my shell server on the internets when I got a warning about the SSH key. In the 30 minutes between leaving my house and getting settled into work you somehow found my box and rooted it. I was unable to log into the machine because you replaced the standard ssh server with your own personal version. This was stupid because if you would have tried to hide yourself a little bit I probably would not have noticed. But I am glad your stupid because had you not done that I would not have switched to Infosec as a career.

     When I looked at your shitty code with comments in portuguese I started to see what you did there. I know you were using my fast connection at the time to move mp3s around and I have to say your choice in music was horrible. After I booted that thing in single user mode and moved the code off to somewhere else I restarted that damn install. Some days I miss those boot floppy linux installs. :)

     To that point I just wanted to be a network engineer because I thought that was really cool messing with routers and switches. I had just set up my first BGP router and route filters and was riding high. But that day when I booted into single user mode I was a changed man. I took that crappy code of yours and rooted myself as soon as the fresh install finished. I learned so much from your code that I started looking for other scripts to play with. I think it was 6 months later I got my first dedicated security job. (very rare at the time)

     After being in this business for a long time now I talk to a lot of people who got into this line of work for the exact same reason. Something they used got wtfpwntsauced and they found a whole new world once their eyes were opened. So although I was extremely pissed at the time I want to take back that anger and formally thank you for owning me. I can't think of anything else I would rather be doing.

Smooth out