My first ISP
Way back in the early 90s, I was in junior high and my brother attended college at a local university. One of the few perks of going there was free dial-up internet access and a shell account on a shared UNIX machine. When he was home and in a good mood, he and I would download Mac shareware from the big Mac archives: infomac, wuarchive, umich, others I’m forgetting. He showed me how to use rn on the shell server to read usenet, how email worked with pine, and from watching him I learned basic shell commands.
Internet access too big a draw to solely rely on his highly-variable moods. I needed my own access. So I called the university computer center help desk, said I was a student and how do I get hooked up with my own dial-up and shell account. It turned out to be very, very easy! All I had to do was connect to the dial-up server and use a special login name. That kicked off a script that let me set up an account. The snag was I needed a valid student id number.
I knew from my brother that the university student ids were just social security numbers: I had one of those! So I dialed up, ran the script, put in my details and my ssn, and boom: I had my very own dial-up access and shell account.
This was simply awesome. I only had this account for a year or so, though. One day I started running random commands in /usr/bin and I guess something I ran drew the attention of the admins. My access got shut off, and I was internet-less once more.
A few years later, I found myself attending the same university. I tried to get an account through the computer center, using what seemed to be a slightly-updated version of the old script. The university still used ssns for ids, and the system said I already had an account. I was in the computer center on campus just then, so I walked over to the help desk and explained I wanted to make an account but it said I had one already. Help desk guy somehow cleared the old account, I reran the script and I was back in! :D
tags: social-engineering, month-of-blogs