How to forge email.
The first hacker convention I ever went
to was Def Con III, held in the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas
in August 1995. I brought a subnotebook computer running Windows
3.11, and a modem. It seems that the ballroom had a live phone
connection that wasn't doing anything, so I kind of colonized
it. I telnetted into the various Unix type computers where I
had shell accounts and entertained lots of hackers by showing
them how they could forge email on almost any Internet host computer.
Gregory Gillis of the Dis
Org Gang thought this was so cool that
he had me write instructions for forging email, which he put
on a floppy disks and sold to people at this Def Con.
It's much harder nowadays to forge email
than it was back when I published this Guide. The reason is that
spammers use email forging to send junk email. This puts a heavy
load on the computer used for forging email, making it unable
to perform its legitimate tasks. It also makes the people who
get all those "live hot XXX chicks" emails madder than
heck! So only the clueless leave their email servers open to
the public.
If you want to forge email, it still
is easy to do -- you just have to know more than the spammers.
In the Guide below I've added instructions on how, in less than
ten minutes, to find a computer on which to forge email. Oh,
yes, if you want really, seriously detailed, up-to-date instructions
on how to forge email, see my Happy
Hacker book, which is on the bookshelves
of most Barnes & Noble bookstores. -- Carolyn Meinel
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GUIDE TO (mostly) HARMLESS HACKING
Vol. 1 Number 2
In this issue we learn how
to forge email -- and how to spot forgeries. I promise, this
hack is spectacularly easy!
______________________________________________________________
Heroic Hacking in Half an Hour
How would you like to totally blow away your friends? OK,
what is the hairiest thing you hear that super hackers do?
It's gaining unauthorized access to a computer, right?
So how would you like to be able to gain access and run a
program on the almost any of the millions of computers hooked
up to the Internet? How would you like to access these Internet
computers in the same way as the most notorious hacker in history:
Robert Morris!
It was his “Morris Worm” which took down the Internet
in 1990. Of course, the flaw he exploited to fill up 10% of the
computers on the Internet with his self-mailing virus has been
fixed now -- on most Internet hosts.
But that same feature of the Internet still has lots of fun
and games and bugs left in it. In fact, what we are about to
learn is the first step of several of the most common ways that
hackers break into private areas of unsuspecting computers.
But I’m not going to teach you to break into private
parts of computers. It sounds too sleazy. Besides, I am allergic
to jail.
So what you are about to learn is legal, harmless, yet still
lots of fun. No pulling the blinds and swearing blood oaths among
your buddies who will witness you doing this hack.
But -- to do this hack, you need an on-line service which
allows you to telnet to a specific port on an Internet host.
Netcom, for example, will let you get away with this.
But Compuserve, America Online and many other Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) are such good nannies that they will shelter
you from this temptation.
But your best way to do this stuph is with a SHELL ACCOUNT!
If you don’t have one yet, get it now!
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Newbie note #1; A shell account is an Internet account that lets
you give Unix commands. Unix is a lot like DOS. You get a prompt
on your screen and type out commands. Unix is the language of
the Internet. If you want to be a serious hacker, you have
to learn Unix.
****************************
Even if you have never telnetted before, this hack is super
simple. In fact, even though what you are about to learn will
look like hacking of the most heroic sort, you can master it
in half an hour -- or less. And you only need to memorize *two*
commands.
More how to forge email -->>
