Dear all, I am starting a new ???history??? section of the ???weird machines and security??? publication PoC||GTFO (https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo for my mirror, https://www.nostarch.com/gtfo for a printed compilation of the first 15 issues). Ideally we would like some articles about the history of security exploits where the historical importance is emphasised: we always get authors willing to tell us about the latest and greatest web exploit but they often lack any historical perspective about what has been done before. As PoC||GTFO has a strong emphasis on weird machines and generally forgotten hardware and software I thought that the contributors to TUHS would be ideally placed to write something about their preferred security exploits in the past. I have fond memories of taking over a machine using and NFS /home filesystem exported to the wide-world, of someone trying to hack into my MasPar via the DEC Ultrix which controlled it, etc. but I am really rather interested in other perspectives. I hope a few of you will want to contribute something to the collection, there is still space for the January 2018 edition if anyone is so inclined. Cheers, Arrigo

Well if you include that one, you may want to include the simple brute force testing of passwords against /etc/passwd (before shadow files existed). The login name and real names (direct or reversed) would tend to get at least one hit.

Hence the CTL-ALT-DEL log in feature of NT (and later windows). I remember when the beta NTs came out and I loaded up countless floppies to see the Windows NT "Preliminary" logo come up and then a pop up telling me to type CTL-ALT-DEL to log in.

On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 12:08:21PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: Well if you include that one, you may want to include the simple brute force testing of passwords against /etc/passwd (before shadow files existed). The login name and real names (direct or reversed) would tend to get at least one hit.