hack

My Best "Hack"

     Hmm, let's see. See, I used to live off  "stolen" AOL accounts for years. I had a whole technique down. I would solicit all the lesbian rooms on AOL. On the stolen account that I was on to begin with, I would make myself a lesbian AOL staff worker. Then I would quickly Instant Message each person in the room with, "Hi, my name is Pamela and I'm with AOL Security. There is a reciprocating time-bomb virus(some bullshit I made up) in our database that has compromised your account integrity. Please respond with your logon password so we can salvage your account. Thank you for being an American Online Member."
     Now, on every single Instant Message you send on AOL, in big red letters it says, "AOL STAFF WILL NEVER ASK YOU FOR PASSWORD OR BILLING INFORMATION." Suckers would still fall for it, though. What would happen is the lesbians would get the message, doubt it, check the profile and see that I was a lesbian too. I got passwords like crazy. I know my keyboard shortcuts real good and I would just haul ass at sending IM's. I programmed myself.

     Just like pirated-software, AOL just simply ignored it. In essence, all us password solicitors were educating AOL members. Let's say the person tries to get on their account while I was signed on. A little grey box pops up informing them that their account is logged on. It says, "If this is unauthorized, call 1-8000-???-????." The person calls, verifies their account information, I get kicked off the account and AOL resets the password and tells the owner. Now how much money does it cost to do that? Plus, with every member AOL loses, there's like 100 more ignorant fools signing up. AOL doesn't give a flying fuck about it's members.

     So I had this big list of ignorant people's accounts. With their password I could log onto their account, read their email, and basically do whatever I wanted. If I got reported and it died, oh well. It wasn't mine to begin with. Next.

     This was back after my first head injury in 96. Well, one day I was looking through this one lesbian's email. I stumbled onto her phone number. It was a 1-888 number that is toll free to whoever calls it, but she has to pay for each call. I was bored one night so what I did was I mass-mailed that number to thousands of random people on AOL. In the mail with the number I wrote, in big capital letters, "HELP! I'M GOING TO KILL MYSELF. I NEED SOMEBODY TO TALK TO! PLEASE CALL ME! I'M NOT KIDDING!"

     I didn't think anything of it, and just got off the computer. Well, a couple hours later I try to get on her account and I can't because she's on. So I get on a different stolen account and send her a message. I say, "Hi, I was on your account earlier. I sent out your phone number." She just blew it and started calling me every name in the book. I warned her that I was going to report her to AOL for profanity, hehe. Anyway, I just told her, "Listen, I am going to sit here and explain to you every single way people get passwords on AOL. You will not get this fucked over by anyone else again. I will be the only person to fuck you over this bad." She calmed down and eventually started talking to me. It turns out that the EMS, Fire Department and police had all been dispatched to her office for that "suicide threat." People from all around the world called this lady, and she had to pay for every single phone call.

     Man, if I would have been traced and prosecuted I would still be in jail. See, it was things like that, the fact that nothing happened to me, which proved to me how much the Internet doesn't play by our rules.

     Ultimately, the idiot lesbian gave me her her password, and AOL's got their liability covered with that warning, so it was her fault for being stupid.  Hopefully she learned.

     It's been some years since I have played around on other people's accounts. AOL patched up the known schemes. I am sure more have evolved, but I have been offline for a while.