Back to the 90s — Part Three: Declassified

Meet Duncan

Duncan was a jolly sort of chap: friendly, enthusiastic, driven and highly intelligent. Looking back, he reminded me a little of the late, great Kevin Mitnick — not just in personality, but also in appearance. There was a passing resemblance. We hit it off immediately.

The College Computer Lab

It wasn’t long before we made our way to the college’s computer lab. By today’s standards, it was practically a museum!

The lab was filled with what must have been 386 PCs, complete with 14-inch CRT monitors, 3.5-inch floppy disk drives and keyboards so robust that they could probably double as offensive weapons. 😉 Even the mice were old-fashioned, wired, two-button, roller-ball affairs.

The lab was networked using 10BASE2 Ethernet, running over coaxial cable at 10 Mbps. Somewhere in the corner of the room, inside a locked cupboard, sat the server. On top of the cupboard were a monitor and an HP A4 LaserJet printer.

The network didn’t extend beyond the lab, and we had no internet access.

Remember, this was 1993. The internet already existed, of course, but it was a very different place from the everyday utility we know today. The World Wide Web was only just beginning to gain traction, and most people I knew had never even heard of it!

I remember the network being associated with Novell, which makes sense given one particular detail that stuck in my mind: the use of the word SUPERVISOR for an account with the highest level of network privileges.

The user PCs ran Microsoft Windows 3.1 on top of MS-DOS 5.

Something Caught My Eye

At this particular moment, Duncan and I were the only people in the lab.

He fired up a PC and waited for what seemed like several minutes for it to boot to the login prompt. When the prompt finally appeared, he quickly typed in a username and password.

But something caught my eye.

The Windows environment that appeared on screen looked different from the one I’d seen on my own profile. For a start, there were more icons — including the MS-DOS Prompt.

Hang on a minute. Wasn’t access to MS-DOS restricted by the network’s security settings?

Duncan clearly had access to facilities that weren’t available to an ordinary user. He proceeded to demonstrate some of the things he could do.

He created a new user account, gave it supervisor-level privileges, logged into that account on another machine, logged out again and then deleted the account.

I stood there with my jaw practically on the floor.

“How?” I asked.

Duncan gave me a cheeky smile, followed by a stifled laugh.

“I’m a hacker!” came the reply.

Becoming His Student

To the 16-year-old version of me, this was beyond cool.

Here was someone who understood computers at a level I’d barely imagined, and he was prepared to teach me some of the digital dark arts. Without a single word being spoken about it, I had become his student.

Where the Weaknesses Lay

Duncan went on to explain how parts of the network’s configuration had been left accessible to ordinary users.

The .ini files associated with the college’s network could be located and edited. They contained information relating to user accounts, and the way the system had been configured opened up possibilities that the network administrators had presumably intended to keep out of reach.

This wasn’t just something Duncan told me about. I went on to edit those files myself.

The system had weaknesses, and understanding how it worked meant discovering where those weaknesses lay. For a teenager who had only recently started learning to program a graphical calculator, this was an entirely new world.

Duncan also explained that his own everyday account wasn’t a supervisor account at all. He kept a separate account with elevated privileges.

The logic was simple: keep the powerful account separate from the one you used every day — just in case someone decided to carry out an audit!

Word 2.0 and the Object Packager

He then showed me how to access programs that had been restricted by the network configuration.

One example involved Microsoft Word 2.0.

He opened Word and navigated through the following menu sequence:

Insert → Object → Package

This opened the Object Packager.

From there, he demonstrated how an executable could be packaged and launched from within Word. He chose COMMAND.COM — the DOS command interpreter — to show just how easily an application could provide a route into something users weren’t supposed to access directly.

Next, he opened a document in Word that required a password to access.

The screen was full of icons. Duncan explained that these had been created using the Object Packager, providing convenient ways to launch different programs — from command-line tools to games such as Solitaire.

To me, it was astonishing.

Thinking Outside the Box

Applications weren’t necessarily the sealed boxes I’d imagined them to be. With the right knowledge, it was possible to find unexpected ways of making them do things their designers might never have intended.

And that changed the way I looked at more than just technology.

It changed the way I looked at life.

I began to understand the importance of thinking outside the box, questioning assumptions and not automatically accepting the limits imposed by a system.

Just as I’d discovered that a humble graphical calculator could be programmed to play games, I was now discovering that computers and networks could hold possibilities far beyond their apparent limitations.

The trick was learning how to find them.

Coming Next

Next instalment: TOP SECRET — Industry secrets in my hands!

Back to the 90s Series