Many years ago the Internet was on dialup. If you don’t know what that is, well we have the Google now. Yes we had to hear that every time we connected.
I belonged to a long defunct and even for the time a technology deficient ISP that had probably less than 500k members across the country. Don’t try to guess, I won’t tell.
Back then the customer service didn’t rely on much other than personal information. Internet searches weren’t very easy to do, so finding information wasn’t easy. You’ll see why this plays in to what I did
I got into a petty teenage argument with somebody on there, and the way the service worked was you could find the master account, and each master account could have up to 5 sub accounts, for kids, spouse, etc. and I found it was under her father’s name. So I decided to call customer service, pretending to be him, verifying only the address, phone number, and they reset the password. After that the master account had control over the sub accounts, so I changed this girl’s password and basically locked her out of everything.
The ISP went offline a few months later. She never got her account back, and I used it only sparingly to be a jerk to people, because that’s what you do when you’re a teenager I guess. So I’m pretty sure that this was probably against the law somehow. Nothing ever happened.
Comments
Yes, it would have been considered hacking under the computer fraud and abuse act even though it’s not really.
It’s social engineering. there’s a good book on it by kevin mitnick
Man, early internet days were the wild west, eh? Can’t believe how easy it was to pull pranks back then. IDC, we’ve all done stupid shit as teenagers. Glad we evolved in terms of privacy n stuff now. Still, ur post got me nostalgic for the dial-up sound. The anticipation of it connecting… or not haha. Up for sharing tech failures from our past, but let’s not glamorize bad decisions, guys. Stay classy, Redditors!
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Peak 90s Internet chaos 👀 Back when tech support was just random guesswork and praying to the dial up gods. Kids today will never know the pain of fighting for the phone line or the sweet screech of dial up connecting 😁
No calls were made while I was on 😂 n went ape s if someone called
I did something related just recently. Sort of in the illegal/grey area as well…
I live in a shared house with 10 other flatmates and our landlord has the cheapest, worst internet plan available.
Me and and my fiancé are big into gaming. She plays a lot of online competitive games like Valorant, Counter Strike, PUBG, etc. I do play a few online games myself, but they’re not well known indie titles where we roleplay as dinosaurs (I’m incredibly autistic about dinosaurs), and low ping isn’t crucial here.
Due to the weak ahh internet we kept having major problems with latency and disconnection, especially during the afternoon and at night time because everyone is streaming movies and youtube in the house.
One day i decided we’ve had enough, so i logged into the modem (the owners didn’t change the login info at all) and prioritised the connection to our gaming pc’s. So no matter what the others are doing (or rather trying) we get all the bandwidth we need whenever we need it. Since then, all the flatmates kept complaining as well that their shit isn’t working properly, and something is wrong. Well… i knew exactly what was wrong, but i was playing along.
Anyways… it’s very mean towards the others i know, since we’re all the victims of a cheapskate landlord. We have been complaining for the past year and the owners don’t want to do anything about it. Only excuses, and more excuses. “Oh don’t watch so many videos, don’t play so much.” Excuse me, i’m paying hard earned dollars here, lots of em! I just want normal living conditions. If the internet can’t handle a dosen people at once? Why should we suffer for your bad plans and management?? Just get a better internet plan ffs!
We’ve got our own mobile broadband plan since, and i know it wasn’t the right thing to do, but fucking hell!!! The continous disconnecting, videos, movies, websites, even simple google searches loading forever… a 3 minute song on youtube keeps loading for 10 minutes, and such things. This shit gets incredibly frustrating after a while. Especially if you’re trying to do things like booking medical apts or tax return. Ughhh… none of us likes this guy btw, he’s making thousands of dollars on us weekly and what we get in return? Shit internet, not enough bins to put waste in, constant complaining about high water and electricity bills… like c’mon dude what’d you expect? Infuriating, i swear!
……Ben???
This story takes me back to 7th grade in the early 2000’s, I “hacked” my middle school crushes AIM account by correctly guessing her password (was just her first name in all lower case). I messaged a few people from her account. That’s it.
Anyone remember AOHELL?
Soooo, Prodigy!
Loves them. Still use my random assigned username/email address as part of a password in a few places.
In the 90’s, I typed in the address of my ISP and a backslash, and hit enter. Suddenly I was viewing a database of all their customers, with all their logins, phone numbers, addresses, etc.
I never did anything with it, just interesting to see what crappy security they had.
Half a loaded page of boobies was no fun.
I remember back in the day, you could reset an MSN accounts password if you had the secret question. Apparently it also wasn’t too hard back then to make a Facebook account with “Staff” in the name somewhere to get people to tell you their secret question answer as well.
Let’s just say if I had figured this out at the time (which I definitely hadn’t) I would have used this power to fuck with the people at school who were assholes to me.
I’m pretty sure I got hit with this same exploit when I was a bit younger and someone stole all my Habbo Hotel furniture 🙁
Does anyone remember Kermit?
“Browsing” the web with DOS?
…….”You got mail”
This is a “vishing” attack, and was used recently (2023) to ransom the MGM and Caesars casinos in Vegas.
Obviously, your efforts were far less malicious but you were ahead of your time!
In the Vegas attack, hackers called the help desk pretending to be employees, and used information they found on LinkedIn to get their passwords reset.
Caesars paid the $15M ransom to get their systems back. MGM refused, and it ended up costing them over $100M in lost revenue and damages.
Netscape was my first love. I remember one time I was on a “adult website” trying to save pics, I must have mis-clicked and set the image to the desktop background. I had a Tandy and let me tell you, everything took forever to work. We’ll I finished my fap session turned it off and went to bed. My dad the next day turns on the computer and it loads in, what does he see? “College sluts” banner background on the desktop. It never loaded while I was hopping around. It only loaded up to the next day. I was mortified. …. I blamed it on my mom lmao. 🤣 I also once installed a dialer to a porn site that connected somewhere in South Africa. My parents got a phone bill of 200 dollars…. I thought I was caught and busted and that was it, unfortunately, the bill had rolled over into the next month… which was about 500.00 dollars. I didn’t get an allowance for the next year and a half.
I remember using call waiting and “operator interrupt” to knock my friends offline when we were fighting.
> Yes we had to hear that every time we connected.
Well, no, you didn’t. You could disable it. Most folks didn’t, though. They just complained everytime they connected to the internet. Bitching was easier than doing something about it.
Down votes from all the computer illiterates from back in the day who still haven’t learned about computers.
48k Baud Rate! I had AOL on turbo boost!!
Boy this brought back memories!
1973, I got myself banned from the school computer for life. I’m talking 2400 baud handset cradle modem. I got banned for “exploring” the schools filesystem. 1974, I switched the locker re-assignment codes for our two junior high schools. They had to buy like 2000 combination locks. Revenge was sweet! I’d like to say I became a responsible computer user after that, but then came Commodore, trs80, BBS’s, fast 56k modems, and slow free porn!
TQUQ25B, here
Sounds like prodigy, well played LOL
It was a glorious day when we upgraded to a 33.3kb. That should give some indication. Also some good guesses on the ISP. But are any correct? 😁
I’d forgotten about that lol. We quickly got a 2nd phone line because I was an internet junkie in no time 😁
Daaaad! I need to use the computer! (My daughter)
My mom’s friend once drove a rage-filled three miles from her house to ours, ending in a wheels-locked two-foot stomp on the brake pedal in our driveway, just to step out of the car and scream through our window
“GET OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER- I’VE BEEN TRYING TO CALL YOUR MOTHER ALL DAMN DAY”
At which point she hopped back in that rusty 1984 pontiac parisienne coupe and drive another three miles home to again attempt to reach my mother by phone.
I will never forget that day.
I remember being 16 and i would get grounded from the phone and computer. My boyfriend at the time had a 2nd phone line put into my bedroom and my uncle had already gave me a computer. My mom would get so mad she couldnt ground me from those things anymore. Heres the part that really irked her nerves. My computer was hooked to her phone line. So she couldnt use her house phone so she would ask to use mine and i told she wasnt aloud that she was grounded from using my phone… i was a petty asshole back then
Today that’s a major crime but back then, nah nobody cared or even knew what the hell you were doing or did
I remember when cable internet was brand new. You could see all of the other computers in the neighborhood in the network neighborhood on windows. And you could just make up an ip address to get more than one computer online. This was before residential routers were a thing. All we had was a 10mbps 5 port hub with the red collisions light.
100% solid guess that this was CompuServe. Cs was aol’s ugly, less popular cousin with the same master/sub setup, and free trial disks 🤣. They accessed the same chat rooms and the same message boards and Aim.
Yes, the good old 56k modem. Running on a machine with a 133mhz processor. Windows 95. It was a simpler time.
Riddle me this…who kicked the Llamas ass?
a/s/l pic?
I remember talking to a guy in a chat room in the late 90s (I was in high school) and he was able to somehow take control of my computer and make my CD drive open and it scared the crap out of me
In the 2010s as a tween, I figured out how to get into people’s emails using the lost password system. For a bunch of people I knew, I would check what their recovery questions were and try to bring it up in conversation. I kept this on hand in case I needed to get into their emails. I only ever used it on one person and that was me regretting sending an email and deleting it
EarthLink
Why in the world would I try to guess defunct isp’s out of thousands and act like it means anything to me or the story?
I miss the early days of internet
A master account and 5 subs? Sounds like AOL. I still have mine, with 2 active subs
The master strictly collects junk mail.
1 sub was my original work email. I still use it for non-work stuff, and also junk mail.
My mother still uses one of the subs. It’s her only email.
I remember when you got charged for text. Like even receiving one was a charge not just sending it. I would add your number on the receiving side 10 times ( that was the most you could do in a group text) and type whatever in the message spot and send it.
I got charged one text but bc you were on the list 10 times you got it all 10 times and were charged. Do that 10 text on my end and you just got hit for 100 received text.
My ex mother in-law drove an hour to our house convinced we were all deceased because our phone had been busy for an hour. Duh, we were online.