Pictured below is a LAN (local area network) party organized by Cryptik (wearing the Def Con shirt) at Carolyn Meinel's home in Feb. 1998. They had networked computers running Linux, Irix, and Windows 95. Cryptik is showing how to use a Linux sendmail flaw to get root (total control). He learned how to break into and defend computers the legal, fun way, playing hacker games such as this with friends. A few weeks later he became the first sysadmin on our Hacker Wargame.

Nowadays Cryptik is working his way through college writing computer security software for a major company.

Following are some samples of the email we get from people who are using the information at this web site to make the world a better place and have a great life.

From: Albino
Subject: some manna from Australia

Dear Carolyn,

I'm just writing to offer you my support while you going through these problems with ... misguided hacking groups. Hang in there, you're very important to a lot of people around the world. Including me :-)

When i first got connected to the internet, my friend had already started me on the path of lame canned DOS's i.e. winnuke, and i can remember quite clearly being told on irc by this friend "nuke the lamer" little did i know who the true lamer was.... i continued for a while with this, finding more destructive means, until one day i stumbled upon an old happy hacker article, i read it and the well u can say the rest is history, cause now i understand the difference between lamer and hacker. Much like a mum teaches her children the difference between good and bad. hehehehe ok maybe that example was a bit stereotypical but i hope u can understand what i'm trying to say :-P

once again hang in there and good luck, myself and many others are backing you up :-)

take care 

From: EJ
Subject: Thanks, Thanks and Thanks once more!

Dear Carole,

I'm a newbie (thought process scanners indicates you're thinking "Oh, GOD! what dumb request is it going to make?) and I've thoroughly read a few of your GTMHH. You probably get lots of newbies and script kiddies who just read through them and instantly start planning their way to 3l33t haxor k1n6 fame by hacking some big site. B0!lo$ to them.

I read your guide to being a hero in computing lab. Nice. Very nice. Precisely what I'd already done. At college (I'm from UK, btw) our network was win3.1/95 hybrid. Oh, really secure. My teacher (Mr.Dumbass-er-Dr.S*******) thought it was pretty secure and that no-one stood a chance of getting access to games at lunchtime. Fool. Doom isn't too hard to encrypt and compress. After five days of him desperately searching for the hidden copy of Doom on the network, he gave up, made me a student technician, let me start a doom club, and recently (just after I left for Uni - talk about crud timing) rebuilt the system to WinNT/Novell.

So, why the thanks now? Because I just succeeding in getting a spammer kicked off their ISP. They were running a "test our email tracking system for Free GAP clothes" scam through Yahoo. Took twenty minutes and they were gone. Yahoo canceled their account. Oh, joy!!

So you can rest easy in the safe knowledge that it's not just wannabe-script-kiddies who read your stuff. It does get used for legit purposes, and the info in your Scientific American article was pitched at just the right level: it left me wanting to know the techniques and catch the crooks. If you were any more precise without outright walking-through the cracking process keypress-by-keyopress you'd have been giving wiring diagrams. Screw what HFG says, you're alright. Nice when someone tells you that, init?

Thanks again,

Ed

More email from people having a great life --->>

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