this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I remember, at that time, I was more worried about how admins in my local ISP spend their time than some far away company.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I still remember being a young kid (11-12) and running a program to scan my local ISP in my small town (back then small ISPs could easily get government grants and become a monopoly) for insecure SMB servers or something. I suddenly got a flood of results like

  • /private/passwords.txt

  • /administrator/USD###-users.txt

All kinds of tasty things. Very excite. Then the results started pouring in by the thousands...

  • YOU-ARE-VIOLATING-CFAA

  • FBI-DOORBELL

  • FIRSTNAME-LASTNAME.EXE

  • PWN3D-LMAONOOB

Things like that. I immediately shut my computer down and that was probably the first time my dad saw me not eat for a day. Didn't ask why I wasn't sleeping much the week after that ๐Ÿ˜„

Also I Googled for the filenames and found nothing. So if you're the 50-70 year old who wrote that script and happen to see this, I'd love to get a message with the ISP name. They are in a number of small-medium size towns around my hometown now.