point bREak : trolling BBS applications and users back in the 90s

Presented at ToorCon San Diego 17 (2015), Oct. 25, 2015, 4:30 p.m. (20 minutes).

More than a mid-90s tale, this presentation is a real-life adventure of a sysadmin who is passionate about rock ‘n roll and “all of the dial-up hacker things”. Shuffling through his professional daily activities he became highly involved with remote data communications. And we are not talking (yet) about Trumpet Winsock, m41nb0ard is a SysOp (wow!) of a private BBS and an avid user of other public systems. At a certain day a few users of some of these systems pissed him off, and the uncontrollable motivation of trolling drove him to his first (and possibly only) reverse engineering project. During this presentation he is going to walk you through not only the motivation, but the basic (trust me, for today’s technology very basic) RE techniques utilized to develop a tool to ultimately troll those other users and the possible exploitation of a widely used bulletin board system application. At the end of the day, if you know what PCBoard, Telemate and config.sys are, at least you will feel nostalgic of hearing and seeing application names you thought you would never be seeing at hacker cons in this day and age.


Presenters:

  • m41nb0ard
    MainBoard is a part-time sysadmin responsible for managing a Netware 3.11 network, fighting with NE2000 IRQ settings & driver configurations, trolling end-users, developing macro-economical applications and most important of all: being a SysOp of a private BBS and known throughout a few popular public systems. He is going for a BS degree in Computer Science (which eventually he will drop out), plans on getting his Certified Novell Engineer (which he will never get) and wonders what if some (bad) magic happened and two of his favorite bands Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine ever merged. He is also a consultant providing Netware and BBS installations. He dreams of the possibility of having jobs in the future dedicated to information security and also attending DEF CON, this hacker gathering he read in a magazine that has been happening in Las Vegas for a couple of years now. Despite the fact he is still in the 90s, you can follow him on twitter @m41nb0ard

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