Illuminati Online
I worked for this semi-famous ISP, io.com, launched with money won from a lawsuit against the U.S. government. Their parent company's equipment had been seized and wrecked, based on a false claim that they were training hackers. It was just a role playing game, ya know. You rolled your dice to see if you'd "hacked" the "mainframe", etc.
Their mail cluster wasn't up to snuff and stopped delivering throughout the business day. Nothing but angry customer calls and our lies to them about "nothing we see on our end". Similar problem with newsgroups, which they gave up hosting in-house and outsourced. Their servers and fileshares weren't really set up with reasonable permissions, and you could literally telnet in, without a password, and browse customer's files. This even continued for some years after they had supposedly "hardened" so they could offer network security. Those servers were just a bunch of middling Pentium machines in cheap beige plastic cases sitting on shelves. The original modem pool was literally a bunch of 14.4 modems on a rack.
The above is an abbreviated account, you can visit this archival copy of their old website at io.fondoo.net if you like. Lots of pics!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
