Some of these computers have very good security, making it
hard to have serious fun with them. But others have very little
security. One of the joys of hacking is exploring these computers
to find ones that suit ones fancy.
OK, so now that we are in Morris Worm country, what can we
do with it?
********************************
Evil Genius note: Morris used the “DEBUG” command.
Don’t try this at home. Nowadays if you find a program running
on port 25 with the DEBUG command, it is probably a trap. Trust
me.
********************************
Well, here's what I did. (My commands have no number in front
of them, whereas the computer’s responses are prefixed by
numbers.)
helo santa@north.pole.org
250 callisto.unm.edu Hello santa@north.pole.org
mail from:santa@north.pole.org
250 <santa@north.pole.org> ... Sender Okay
rcpt to:cmeinel@nmia.com
250 <cmeinel@nmia.com> ... Recipient Okay
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
It works!!!
.
250 Mail accepted
What happened here is that I sent some fake email to myself.
Now let's take a look at what I got in my mailbox, showing the
complete header:
Here's what I saw using the free version of Eudora:
X POP3 Rcpt: cmeinel@socrates
This line tells us that X-POP3 is the program of my ISP that
received my email, and that my incoming email is handled by the
computer Socrates.
*****************************
Evil Genius Tip: email which comes into your email reading program
is handled by port 110. Try telnetting there someday. But usually
POP, the program running on 110, won’t give you help with
its commands and boots you off the minute you make a misstep.
*****************************
Return Path: <santa@north.pole.org>
This line above is my fake email address.
Apparently From: santa@north.pole.org
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 96 12:18 MDT
But note that the header lines above say "Apparently-From"
This is important because it alerts me to the fact that this
is fake mail.
Apparently To: cmeinel@nmia.com
X Status:
It works!!!
Now here is an interesting fact. Different email reading programs
show different headers. So how good your fake email is depends
on part on what email program is used to read it. Here's what
Pine, an email program that runs on Unix systems, shows with
this same email:
More how to forge email -->>
