This happened a lot on old gaming forums where hacks were being produced.
When I was much younger I looked up to a game cheats writer on an old forum since he taught me about how they worked, which I found extremely cool (still do!). It actually formed my initial interest in security.
I asked if I could help somehow, as all young, eager noobs at the time did, and to my surprise he said yes. He wanted to track the licenses he sold to which accounts via IRC. The game would boot, hacks get injected, hacks connected to IRC and would interact with an mIRC bot to check them on his own machine. That was my first foray into socket programming and protocols, too.
A while after that, I learned my code had been shared with another cheats maker (not itself a problem for me) when I was contacted to add DCC SEND support, which allowed sending files via IRC. I don't remember if I came to the conclusion myself or if it was explicitly stated, but either way, the objective was clear, and I refused. I felt bad, had learned my lesson, and never contributed to that scene again.
That was in ca. 2006 or so. This has been going on for a long, long time.
It’s okay, my brother’s way of getting hooked on programming was downloading those types of cheats for Counterstrike, and reverse-engineering them to strip out the bad functionality. It’s not so much keyloggers as running into the cheat creator in a game, and they get mad and say “I’m going to remotely crash your PC watch!” and then getting even more mad when it doesn’t work.
Counterstrike was my first ever introduction to real life cheating. We used to do LAN parties and play mostly that. One guy came and talked about how good he was and, to his benefit, he was really really good.
Then when the guys who were taking a break started watching him, they saw that he was tracking players as they went across the other side of the map, and his gun was firing as soon as they were in view. Headshots every time.
It blew my mind for two reasons.
1. It was possible.
2. This was a party with zero point of winning. There was no prize. Why cheat?
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Yep. I learned Java just to hack a math program in middle school. It had a hint button that would eventually give you the answer but would dock your progress by quite a bit if you used it at all.
I modified it to run the "solve answer" method without reporting back to the server at a random interval that was just human enough, and played Minecraft in the meantime.
In my defense, I knew the material just fine. The program was very anal about whitespace, parenthesis, order of terms (even if it was inconsequential), so most of the homework time was spent fighting with it instead of testing my math skill. The grade for it was also pass fail, whereas the tests were what mattered (and I dared not cheat on those).
Ended up learning a valuable skill at the same time, so I still consider it a win.
Same kind of kidhood. At school a social reject but during the night a script kiddie shovelling content across IRC and FTP sites.
Oh hi, another one of those checking in. IRC, Grim's Ping, FTP/FXP (preferably the WinNT machines where files could be made undeleteable). Those were the days.
Oh man, FXP, couriering (the original “currying”!) and 0day drops…
This thread is such a solid shot of nostalgia, and why I love HN.
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I miss those days tho
Honestly, to a degree I chalk this up to boys will be boys.
I had my own stint doing this type of stuff on my different schools networks growing up and it too spawned an interest that’s led me to an entire career.
You shouldn’t feel bad - you learned, you got your kicks, and developed a conscious once you knew better. If dealing with some hacks in some of the games I played meant some curious kid got their start with programming it was well worth it.
What does piss me off are the people who turn it into a living to the extent where it becomes a plague - Warzone is a perfect example. Sure, the game still makes money, but the actual “scene” is fed up with it. I get that these same type of people/hacks are what you may have briefly been a part of, but it’s still not the same thing.
A kid contributing for fun is different than orchestrating the entire thing.
My take on it at least.
I'm having memories of being asked to remove "the curse words" from the cracker startup screens on AppleII 80s games and stuff. These were almost always graphics buffer files (memory dumps) and the fix was hardly hacking (find file, edit in paint program) but it made me feel l33t.
I don't know how any software houses made money with the floppy copy scene in the 80s.
I know what you mean
Like back when all you had to do to get banned software to run on your school’s computer was rename the executable to notepad.exe - I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel like neo in the matrix at the time