Thread

1. lm411 · 1789782149 · focus · HN ↗

   The Warez scene was an absolute blast. I made some of the best friends of my early teenage years there, both online and online/offline.

   Unfortunately it came to a sudden end after I got a little too cocky and persistently took and re-took control of a smallish US telecom companies network, and the RCMP came knocking on my door for the FBI. That was largely unrelated to Warez but the advice given to me was that I should probably stop that as well. Thankfully I was too young to be charged with any of it at that time.

   I do regret the massive headaches I must have caused the system administrators at the telecom company. Sorry guys. I have repaid my bad karma many times.

   1. arcade79 · 1789811705 · focus · HN ↗

      Oh...

      If those RCMP folks came knocking on your door around January 22nd 1999. Hi there. Long time. It was fun chasing you, but I didn't enjoy the rm -rf.

      1. lm411 · 1789864031 · focus · HN ↗

         This would have been a few years earlier... And I don't recall doing anything destructive.

         It was definitely a game but I wasn't trying to cause any damage. No doubt I caused more than a few headaches though, which I do truly regret, having been on the other side of the same many times over the past 30 years.

         1. arcade79 · 1789866312 · focus · HN ↗

            Ah. A few years after you, then, there was a 16 year old Canadian out of #montreal (on IRC) who broke into my main server - on December '24 1998. He ended up rm -rf'ing it, and bragging about it on IRC.

            I spent the next month tracking him down. He was fond of DoSing a Canadian ISP. He also, for some reason, fond of DoSing a computer lab at NASA. I tracked him through servers he had broken in at 13 different american universities, a couple of machines at NASA, one machine at fbi.gov, and a variety of others.

            Coordinated with a guy at NASA, everyone but FBI was eagerly sending me logs from their servers, and the FBI+NASA looped in RCMP who got thousands of pages of logs from me. Both from servers he had broken into, and from the various IRC channels I monitored his activity from. The Canadian ISP he was fond of DoSing was also quite eager.

            Around January 22nd 1999 (might have been a day before or after) the RCMP came knocking on his door. A few hours later (after being released after being interrogated) he got online and told me he would knock my servers offline permanently. At this point I had a phone number directly to the RCMP - and they paid him another visit.

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