Login.exe
My boring story of the login sniffer program I wrote in college in the 90s. During my computer course we were learning Pascal. I noticed people would turn the PC on, not change to the network drive in DOS and would type login at the C: prompt. So my version of login.exe sat in the root of C: would get the users name and password and save it to assignment.doc because people often left their assignments in root of C:
I'd come back later and grab the assignment.doc
I was amazed it worked as I was never good at programming. I hadn't worked out how to not display the password as they typed it. But most people didn't spot that as they wouldn't be looking at the keyboard. I still remember one of the passwords now, decades later, masterofpuppets
It worked, I was logged in as that user. I smiled and logged out again. Warned my friends it was just a test, its not to be abused, if they get caught with it they no nothing and its their problem. Thankfully I was bunking off sick the day they did get caught with it.
It all kicked off. It highlighted the poor security the IT team were running. But one of the "friends" had also, very weirdly, been creating cartoons with a cartoon app on the PCs that were taking the piss out of the lecturers(he was on that guy)
So all 3 of them got suspended. They all got called in for interviews one by one. 2 of them got expelled and one just a 2 week suspension. They said they were questioned about the login.exe program, that it was a great piece of coding, who wrote it? They must know as it was in Pascal. They denied all knowledge thankfully. And I pointed out "the great bit of coding" was them trying convince them to confess. It wasn't that great. Why? I'd got it from the help file in Pascal. How to read text from the screen and save it to a file :) which we hadn't been taught. We all got called into the hall and a warning went out about the program found on the college computers and the 2 students that had gotten expelled, that it could of been a police matter. I kept my head down after that. But if their security hadn't been so shit it would never have happened.
Eventually we all moved to Win95 so it was no longer relevant however my cousin was at leeds uni training to be a doctor. He said they had the same DOS login, could he have it. I said sure. During that time me and his brother were sending each other a floppy disk each month. One month on his floppy was a hacker magazine, it might of be 2600. In it it had a very simple routine of encryption in Pascal. My coding is/was shit and so is my maths but it was really simple so I used it for the login.exe
All it did was encrypt the assignment.doc so if IT found it, it would look scrambled even if opened in Word or wordperfect. Unlike my earlier version where it was obvious what the assignment.doc was for. It just took for example the letter A that you'd typed, subtract 50 or whatever number I used from the ASCII value and wrote that back to the assignment.doc my separate decrypt program just reversed this.
Never found out if he ever used it at Leeds uni or not. It was the late 90s.
You may hear I went on to be a leet programmer. Nope, I'm still shit. Got bored of programming and went on to be an IT engineer instead. Now wish I'd stuck with the programming. Could of made big bucks converting from COBOL as we were also being taught that.
I found my CD from those days with some of my college work and floppies on it. Sadly not the login.exe program or code. I did however find my lottery program I'd written in Visual Basic and the Pascal version. It had a bug in the installer that I fixed 19 years later. God knows why I hadn't fixed it back then. It was a really simple fix . Odd.