Re: Net Send - Useful sometimes, when not abused
And yet, there were times when it was quite useful when not exploited for devious, um, exploits.
Back in the mid 90s before a lot of [now] obvious security holes were plugged, I was working at a government facility supporting hundreds of international sites. Those sites were initially set up by our HQ team and remotely managed, but left the locals to perform basic IT operations and updates that had to be done on site (travel budget was good, but not THAT good). During one update instance, a particular site could not complete some thing or other, so they called for help. This was before VoIP and we had a robust VPN and everyone was on a 10-net, so calls could happen and we could still see what was online (or not).
Being an international setup, sometimes things got lost in translation so despite an hour or so of talking and taking the non-IT locals through the motions, we still couldn't get a config file to set correctly. We had something like 211 out of 212 sites successfully updated, but this one was giving us a hard time. The host server's OS was up but the service in question was not and we could only get so far. The last part of this update was a pathname that had to be manually keyed in. I could hear what they were telling me on the phone: "this letter, this symbol, this number, etc...", and it sounded correct, but the problem persisted.
This being the age when Win95 and NT4 still reigned supreme, I had the bright spark to send them *exactly* what should be keyed in. Mind you, we would have sent them an email, but the service in question which was down was in fact their email server. NET SEND to the rescue! I don't remember what it was, but something like a 1 to an I (capital i) or l (lowercase ell), or an O (capital o) to a 0 (zero) that was transposed. Remember: Win95 and NT4 chose its fonts poorly.
When the NET SEND 10.0.212.2 "CAN YOU SEE THIS ON YOUR SERVER SCREEN? HELLO FROM HQ!" hit their server's screen, there was an almighty "Whoop!" heard over my phone. NET SEND's display uses a font that was UNICODE (or something along those lines. Ugly but completely obvious as to what ASCII char was displayed). So we commenced with the correct string that had been muffled from the beginning. Yay!
This was one of the things I stumbled on just before this trouble call came in:
Old school security from Gibson Research Corporation (anyone remember the proto-security site?): Shoot the Messenger