Said this before
Saying it again as I like my little coding story. I don't regret it, wasn't my fault 2 "friends" got expelled from college for it, I warned them.
Was doing my computer course and we were learning Pascal. For some reason they'd never bothered to teach us writing to files. When I came across how to do this in a really good Pascal book I got from the college library. I started to play, then found more on it in the actual Pascal help file in the editor we used.
I realised that when we'd turned the PCs on in the computer room, they'd start on C:. You'd change to T: and type login.exe
Then you'd put in your user name and password then type win for Windows 3.11 for Work Groups. I had noticed people would forget and type login.exe on C: and would leave their assignments on the root of C:. So I created a login.exe in Pascal that displayed the same (although I never worked out how to hide the password as you'd type) as the official login.exe. It would then save the user name and password to a file called assignment.wpd (using WordPerfect at the time). I tried it, it was very simple, it worked!
I stuck it on a few of the PCs in the lab to see what it could pick up. Being totally clueless that I'd written a sniffer program. I told the 3 mates "Don't abuse it. If you get caught with it, you know nothing".
Checked it one day and it had picked someone up with password "masterofpuppets". Logged in as them. I was happy I'd made something that worked. Then logged out and that was it. Told them I just wanted to see it working in the real world. Its not to be abused.
One day I was skipping college and those 3 idiots got caught with it, although other stuff was on one of their floppies abusing the lecturers as one of the "mates" was immature. The rule was, if you'd been spotted pressing the reset button on the PCs, you were up to something. So they got pulled up on that. Found with the sniffer program and the other abusive stuff. Was mainly the abusive material that got two of them expelled and one suspended for the sniffer program. They were questioned but thankfully no one cracked. Told "The code for the program was quite good who made it?". It wasn't good, it was basic and most of it taken from the help file. Lucky for me that didn't make them crack.
Had a big meeting in the hall about how serious it was as that the police could have been called (I think they didn't as they realised how shit their computer security was).
A couple of years later. My cousin and I were mailing floppy disks to each other (it was the 90s). One floppy disk at a time, full of interesting things. He'd got hold of 2600 magazines if I remember right (although not been able to find the article since, so may have been from another mag), which had a piece on Pascal and a basic cipher. So I added that to the login program to scramble the assignment.wpd file, so if they found that, it would look like junk. I never deployed it this time though, although did give it to my cousin who wanted to use it at Leeds Uni, never found out if he ever did.
Sadly, I cut up all the old floppies some years later when CDs became a big thing so I lost all the code. Been trying to recreate it recently for the nostalgia.
