Confessions of a Teenage “Hacker”: Part 1

I feel it’s finally time to fully declassify some information that I’ve shared with a few people, regarding some actions I carried out when I was younger. It’s nothing too criminal, but it does still cause me to laugh with evil maniacal effect inside my head whenever I think about it, or out loud whenever I’ve told it to other people in person. The transgression in question would be stealing my father’s dial-up online access password when I was 14 years old. Multiple times.

The story begins with my simple desire to be connected online when my parents weren’t around. Sure sure, I know exactly what you’re thinking about - but surfing porn wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I used to IM a lot with my friends (because cell phones were expensive bricks back then) and play a lot of online games like Starcraft. During the day, with my sisters both bugging me to use the computer (which we all “shared”), and my parents bugging me to do my homework (which I never did), these activities were not very easy to accomplish. However I didn’t have much choice because to get online I had to ask my father to first sign me in, being that back then our only option was dial-up networking through AT&T.

So my frustration understandably grew to the point where my only hope was to somehow acquire my father’s internet password so I could sneak downstairs at night (my various ninja actions are stories unto themselves and will have to wait for another post) and log online without being pestered by anyone.

But how? Well I can’t remember exactly when I came up with the solution to this problem, but I do remember the steps I took to get there. First of all were the following observations I had made about my father entering in his password:

* He would enter in the password, always hit Enter, but sometimes nothing would happen. So he then had to use the mouse to click “Connect”
* Sometimes the service would not connect, but it would never say why. So you had to assume you either mistyped the password or something’s wrong with the service at the moment

Now, I had been teaching myself to program for a few years at this point and I was currently working with Visual Basic, which allowed me to create Windows applications. In doing this, I learned the following important things in regards to this problem:

* You can create applications that don’t have a visible window - which means no title bar, close/minimize/maximize buttons, border, etc.
* Text input boxes that show *’s for passwords obviously still have to save, in code, the actual text typed into them

Thus the plan was hatched. I made a simple VB application that was just a password text input box the exact same size as the password text input box in the internet login window. Upon the Enter key being hit, the application would terminate, after it stored the contents of the text input box (which would be the actual text typed in) in a file. This simple application was then utilized in the following manner:

1. I would bring up the login window and for a password type in gibberish approximately the same length as my father’s actual password
2. I would then start up my password stealing application, which would appear on top of the login window, blocking out the actual password input box
3. I would call my father and ask him to sign me online
4. My father would type his password into my text input box and hit Enter
5. My text input box would close and save his password to a file (I do happy dance in my head), but to him it would appear as if nothing happened, as it sometimes does.
6. He clicks “Connect” and the service fails to connect because I entered a bogus password - but it doesn’t tell him that
7. He re-enters his password, and this time everything works fine.

Fortunately for me, and ironically, he never mistyped his password when I was stealing it, which I had to do at least 2-3 times because everynow and then I would get caught online and he would change it. I think at one point my parents might have unplugged the entire phone cable from downstairs… as if I didn’t have my own. Mwaahahaahahahaah.

Given that I’ve confessed to one evil deed, I suppose my next confession would have to be how I used the WM_CLOSE message to create a Win32 program that kept a window from exiting and tortured a poor girl in my computer science class in high school. But that’s for another post.

What? You didn’t know how evil I am?