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In Argentina, as in many forgotten countries, cracking was a necessity. Many
times, even when you wanted to buy the software and had the money (not very
likely), you couldn’t. So, we were only left to our own devices, likely by
design (as they say, the first is free...) I mean, we had to do some
cracking. During my C64/128 era I just didn’t understand enough, but
entering the PC I realized that I just couldn’t copy a program and install
it at home. So, here comes the cracking and the debugger.
So I cracked a few apps, for myself or to amuse friends, like getting
infinite money in Sim City. But one day I was the first to get the new
version of Remote Access (a BBS hosting software) in Argentina, and it
needed cracking.
So I set out to crack it. It was a quick job initially, but then I
discovered there was a whole set of functionality that wasn't regularly
available. This gave me the idea of adding even more functionality (some may
call it a backdoor) that enabled a sort of god mode. It took me a couple of
days. The whole time I was telling people 'yes yes, I'm almost there,
cracking isn't easy you know.' When I finally finished, I slightly changed
the banner to identify it easily, and set it free.
Eventually I found a large paid BBS that had installed my version, so I
dialed in (yeah! I finally got a modem!) and activated my secret menu
option. I used a particular username that froze the screen on the server
side but gave me full control over it (basically remote god mode). It was a
lot of fun, and the BBS hosted a lot of technical information that I craved
for. I believe the username was Daniel Calpazzo, which I picked at random.
After I did this a few times, the BBS showed a new banner: “Daniel Calpazzo,
we noticed you are having problems logging in. Please contact us and we'll
help you”. Nobody else knew about the extra functionality, so after I got
bored and stopped using it, they ended up with a very stable Remote Access
crack.
Software:
---------
I totally forgot before: All sorts of debuggers. Debuggers are the swiss
army knife of hackers. gdb lets you script C, plant in-memory backdoors,
do in-memory cracks, is installed in most systems, and doesn’t trigger AVs
as netcat does (WTF?). But of all RE tools, my love goes to IDA. I
must admit I stopped using IDA regularly just before Ghidra was released,
and I never got fluent in radare or others, though I did use and
contributed to Pedram’s PAIMEI. Still, my favourite software: IDA
Museum:
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A science museum comes to mind first, but I’ve done quite a few, so no.
I like seeing ancient civilizations, and finding (or thinking) how similar
we still are after 5000 years. All anachronistic archaeological findings
really spark my curiosity, but I don’t know if there is such a museum.
Hacking:
--------
Reverse Engineering firmware to add functionality. Hardware hacking and
Hardware making. I wish I did A LOT more of that. Do it yourself for me.
|=---=[ Memorable Experiences:
For this issue, just one, or it’ll get too long: It was the last evening
before shipping our third satellite (Tita, for Tita Merelo). It was
unfinished, of course, and we were doing software changes all the time, even
on the satellite systems themselves (no CI/CD, sorry). The satellite had
(has?) 6 Linux systems, and the main Linux guy was doing the final touches,
everybody around doing stuff, and then “MIERDA!”, he shouted, and silence
fell on the floor. All cameras to his face, he was buried in his hands,
frozen in place, not even breathing... so, somebody approaches to see the
screen, and there were 6 sshs, all doing the same with those multi-ssh
things, all reading:
# rm -rf /
# ^C
# _
So there’s no doubt:
He rm -rf’ed the 6 Linuxes in the satellite. The µSD cards epoxied so they
could stand launch vibrations, computers screwed deep inside, screws
epoxied, the satellite closed, covers epoxied... only an ethernet cable. The
cursor, blinking... late evening, T-12h to ship the satellite in a box to
the launch site in Baikonur.
So, as calm as we could, we took him off the keyboard, and sat down with
Phil, an infinite friend (that never answers my msgs) and an incredible
hacker-in-the-good-sense (if there’s any bad sense), only known to few. We
both sat down, next to each other, in the mode that we had developed during
nights of “playing games”: One types at the keyboard, the other checks and
hits enter. We started going around seeing what was available
# ls -lR /
bash: ls: command not found
# _
# echo /*
/usr /tmp ...
# _
Long story short:
though some binaries remained, /lib had disappeared, nothing that was
dynamically linked really existed.
Digging around, we found a qemu binary on the satellite's ARM system, there
to run x86 binaries. We had no idea why, but it was there, statically