Today, as I pull another pie of memories from the shelf, the internet has become something taken for granted, like water from the tap. A generation of always-on Wi-Fi has been born and raised, one that has never seen images loading from the bottom up, has never written ATL0 in a modem terminal, and feels entirely different emotions at the mention of 'naked grandpa.'
And how wonderful it is! Over a couple of decades, progress has swept across the planet, evolving from tangled phone lines and coaxial webs to powerful fiber-optic roots; from bytes barely extracted from the ether to gigabit channels running into every home. An always-on internet terminal lies in the pocket of even the most casual worker, who finds nothing unusual about regularly video chatting with family in a mountain village. Could we have imagined this twenty, thirty years ago? And yet we are still moving forward: soon a satellite network will cover the entire planet, and communication terminals may be implanted directly in our brains. I canât judge how this will change humanity's life, but I am already preparing to drill a little hole in my skull.
But I turn my gaze to the past and pull from there a substantial text for your Friday coffee, seasoned with internet quirks, drizzled with cybercriminal stories, and served with a whistle in a 14400-bps pipe.
The First Click into the Web
I can't say I was among the pioneers of the internet: I hatched at the wrong time and place for that achievement. Although I dreamed of computers since childhood, I probably learned about global networks in my teenage years. But that knowledge was purely theoretical: I imagined the internet was cool, that you could chat, browse websites, and watch adult content. But how to access all that was beyond me; and where to find out about it in our backwater was a mystery too.
Only in the year 2000 did I see the internet in person.
It was around that time that all sorts of political mess started brewing, which we are still dealing with today. "Unity" emerged, which soon mutated into a party of crooks and thieves, and from the very beginning, its leaders tried to establish their personal Komsomol, into which I got myself tangled. I should probably recall this with shame and regret, but back then I didnât think about any politics at allâwho knew? Moreover, it was fun and really cool: there were always various events going on, and among the guys, there was genuine friendship and mutual support. And most importantly, there was a headquarters that we were allowed to use without any oversight during off-hours.
There, in the headquarters, stood a computer that was always occupied by third âheroesââexcept for those moments when we managed to scrape up some money for internet access! It was a whole sacred act: like the ringing of bells before prayer, the modem would play a magical melody of connection, and once it fell silent, it would present the miraculous icon of the connected status in the Windows 98 tray! Here, I made my first communion: someone was having a name day, which inspired the idea to download and print a greeting card as a gift. For that time and place, it was indeed a cool and original idea!
So the first thing I saw online was a completely unimpressive website with silly greeting cards.
An exposition to what was happening
In the same year, 2000, on December 13, I got my own computer. I remember not only the date, but the entire configuration that fit into a typical case of those timesâwell, you know those beige, monotonous boxes:
Not mine, but very similar. The slot covers were always removed for better ventilation, and for the same reason, the case was often taken off. The photo was found online, but back then, most machines looked something like this.
The computer was bought, as required, "for studying." My parents understood that aside from IT, I was good for nothing else, and they really tried to create conditions for me to enter "programming." But the further it went, the more they doubted their decision. Before long, the classic stories began with hiding power cables and threats to "throw the computer away" â otherwise, I just couldn't detach myself from that wonderful machine. It's funny to recall this after my dad got into solitaire: we switched roles, and I was the one hiding the cables.
I somehow got admitted. The first student parties echoed away, new acquaintances were formed, and it turned out I wasn't the only one who was crazy about this. We, provincial geeks, wanted to connect into a network, and if the distances made twisted pairs unthinkable, phones were available in every apartment back then.
I only needed a modem. The cheapest Lucent Agere Winmodem cost exactly 500 rubles â my student budget for several months. I couldn't afford to work part-time while studying, and I was ashamed to ask my parents... but I just got lucky. On my way to the hated first physical education class, I saw a 500-ruble bill in the hallway! Lying on the dirty floor, it radiated an otherworldly glow, beckoning and promising me the realization of my dreams...
In the evening, I honestly told my parents about the find, preparing for its expropriation into the family budget. But my dad reasoned that someone from the factory workers who had received their pay must have lost the bill; the sympathy between a drunken bum and his own son worked in my favor, and the treasure remained untaken. The very next day, I bought myself the desired device.
Beep-beep, shhhshhhhhhh, motherf***er! Photo from the internet.
Although such soft modems were considered "inferior" due to their software-based signal processing, this PCI model performed much better on our lines than expensive external modems. I collected drivers for it under Red Hat and set it up in BeOS, flashed it to V.92, and tuned the connection with AT commands. It provided me with hours and days spent in free provider chat rooms, playing StarCraft over IPX, it worked as a fax and an answering machine, and, of course, it brought all the joy of the early internet. I somewhat hope that somewhere in my parental home this card still lies, even though it serves no purpose now, except maybe to plug it into a retro system for completeness.
The web envelops the city.
Access to networks in our town was rather poor. FIDO had already died out, there were no enthusiasts for local networks nearby, yet dial-up internet access was provided by three providers: the stepson of the Soviet Volgatelecom (also known as "dgrad"), the progressive "Variant-Inform" ("vinf"), and that third one which didnât operate in my area. Access cost about a dollar per hour, plus or minus five rubles depending on the provider and time of day, and at first, even paying for it was quite a problem. One had to go to the subscriber's office and deposit money into their account; "vinf" introduced prepaid cards with codes a couple of years later, making the top-up process somewhat convenient.
The quality of the connection varied greatly depending on the telephone exchange and the quality of the phone lines. 33600 bps was considered a very good speed, more often it was 28800, or even 9600 bps. Thatâs about 15 minutes to download one megabyte of data! But even such small amounts were enough for a very slow browsing of the then-existing web, and it was sufficient for IRC chats. The disconnections, busy signals, and the need to pay for time were much more pressing issues. And in general â paying...
But we also had some freebies, how could we not! Both "dgrad" and "vinf" offered free guest access as a way to check your account. "Dgrad" limited the guest session by time, while "vinf" limited it by the number of free modems in the pool. And those small free resources available through the "freebies" became a haven for all modem owners in the city.
The 'WinF' platform was particularly good here: a forum, IRC, and their gaming network were available for free. A very large community grew around this, lasting for many years; online interactions transitioned into real life, taking along the inherent freedom of online communication. People of different ages and beliefs not only found common ground but also behaved as equals. LibertĂ©, ĂgalitĂ©, FraternitĂ©!
Ha, what am I rambling about? There were constant conflicts and scandals both inside and outside, real online wars with harassment, relationship clarifications, and even fistfights occurred, intrigue circulated, and various alcoholic misadventures took place. In short, there was plenty of everything â and that's what made it interesting.
The least shocking photo of accompanying events from the author's personal archive.
By the way, around that time, mobile phones started to appear, along with GPRS. The âbackbreakâ with its traffic fees was convenient for constant communication on ICQ, although for a long time, the network coverage left much to be desired (and not everyone could afford the device). I wrote a nostalgic post about the mobile phones of that time and the subculture around them. .
Only a select few lucky ones had satellite internet that came as an add-on with the 'dish.' Of course, it only worked for receiving, as a separate data transmission channel was needed (GPRS was ideal in this regard). Although the cost of satellite traffic was exorbitant, 'dish' owners managed to engage in free 'fishing'âcapturing files in the general data stream. When some Turk downloaded a movie, the signal with that data was sent to the entire reception area; it was simply a matter of extracting the file, which was done using special software. It was among the 'fishermen' that the wildest porn and the earliest pirate releases were found, and they were the ones to approach if serious data volume was required.
Because even a satellite connection was cheaper than a trip to the internet café of the same 'Volgatelecom'; I once got charged a few hundred rubles for a leaked hundred megabytes; moreover, they recorded the disc wrongly, and the files were unreadable at home.
Fakin shield.
However, there was one advantage to "dgrad": its billing system was as full of holes as modern fashionistas' jeans. The modem connection password was always the same as the billing password, and the login often matched the subscriber's phone number. With this knowledge, one could dial into the guest pool, bruteforcing free access, which I was not the only one doing. There was no protection against guessing, the holes were not patched â the provider didn't care, as the customer whose account lost money would surely bring in more.
Now, of course, I would think â how legal and good is it to do this? And I would admit that it's bad and illegal; but at that age, I had a quite different view on such matters, fueled by cult hacker stories from a well-known and regularly read magazine.
I grew up as a cult hacker! The photo is again from the internet, but who didnât have such a stack?
Returning to the cybercriminal past: the most interesting thing was that under one account, any number of users could connect at the same time, as long as there was money in the account. But how much money does a private user really have? Well, fifty rubles, maybe a hundred. A different matter is a company's account with thousands and tens of thousands, not to mention an overdraft! That's what this story is about.
At some point among the students, a rumor started spreading about the magical login of the "Shield" company with an infinite amount of money in the account. The rumor was once confirmed: on one of those local forums, they leaked this login/password (a very simple pair, something like shild/shild). And there were tens of thousands of rubles in that account.
Ah, what a feast it became! Under the "free" login sat probably the whole city. I too got involved a couple of times out of greed and curiosity, but I wasnât particularly afraid of getting caught (our PBX numbers weren't identified by the city, and shouldn't have been identified by the provider either). However, I definitely knew that some individuals had taken advantage and were continuously using that account.
It was curious to observe the situation. For several months, the same thing repeated itself: the account balance plunged into the red, then was topped up to previous values, but only briefly. It was only after a significant amount of time that the password was changed â and the city was draped in a veil of sadness, which lingered, thanks to your humble servant, for a short while.
Of course, brute-forcing this account would have been a hundred percent foolishness, and I didn't do that. More for fun, I tried logging in with the password 'qwerty' â damn it, it worked! Flushed with pride, I (anonymously, of course) leaked the password in the city's IRC...
The second wave didn't take long to arrive. Starved for a couple of days, the opportunists threw caution to the wind and rushed into the network. No discussions about being caught seemed to deter these fools, which was a shame â it later turned out that after the password was changed, the bureaucrats began had a suspicion and contacted the provider, who only then started logging connection numbers.
About a month later, the account was closed for good. An investigator from the Ulyanovsk Department 'K' arrived, someone was summoned for questioning (which shocked the parents immensely), and there were rumors that someone's computer was even confiscated. After such shocking news broke, a literal agony began in the city's online community: everyone who had used the account, even just a little, now feared retribution.
I experienced the situation without much fear, feeling a kind of hacker romance in all this. But, of course, I deleted all the 'compromising' software, hid the 'Everything for the Hacker' disks behind the wardrobe, ripped out the modem and hid it even further. I even taught my dad what to say if I were to be contacted in any way.
And I also started my own investigation.
It was easy. The terrified 'shield users' easily gave up all connections, and I quickly tracked the chains through which the unfortunate login was passed even before it surfaced in public.
The author is conducting an investigation (restored image).
At the center of the web were three freshmen, one of whom leaked access. I called each of them, checking their phones through my contact at the dean's office; during the call, I introduced myself as the Ulianovsk investigator, asking them to share everything openly. It could have been easy to expose me, but fear is a strong motivator â none of the students suspected anything, and all three agreed to a 'deal with the investigation,' turning each other in, as they say, with everything included. The customs officer would have been proud of me!
Unfortunately, I did not record the conversations, but I did learn that the password leaked through a fourth freshman â a relative of the director of that very company. He generously shared the password with his friends, and what three knew, the whole town knew.
I am sure that if I could figure this out, a properly trained investigator would have known by the second morning. It seems like the end of a story, but it was too early to relax since people were still being called in for questioning.
An amusing meeting of 'anonymous freeloaders' was organized: everyone knew each other, if not personally, then through online communication, but pretended they had happened to be there by chance. Some brought their dads, some brought their moms, and some brought lawyers.
The lawyer, a composed and sensible woman, listened carefully to all the facts, concluding that initially the account was published voluntarily, for which the distributor should bear the responsibility. The situation with those who freeloaded after the password had been changed was more ambiguous, but even here the lawyer advised waiting for accusations and evidence, saying that the investigator was trying to intimidate everyone. The recommendation was clear: wait, either for a self-resolve or specifics.
Everyone agreed with this. Everyone except Vova's mother.
You know, there's a type of kid raised in same-sex families, by a mother and grandmother. They are usually very immature and dependent due to overprotection, often lazy, and they never realize that something is wrong with them. Remember that cartoon about Vova Sidorov?
"And the loaf is on his shoulder, he eats when he gets tired!"
Our Vova could have successfully starred in that cartoon playing himself. Of course, the army probably wouldn't compensate for his lack of paternal upbringing, but they would certainly instill some basics of independence. We don't know this because Vova 'entered' university.
So, Vova's mom freaked out that her little son would be expelled, imprisoned, or even drafted into the army, where he would be eaten and raped. And if that was the case, she would immediately go to the investigator and plead with him to settle the matter peacefully. It was impossible to convey rational arguments to the wild woman, while Vova listened to his mother's usual hysterics with a completely indifferent look, as if it didn't concern him.
The lawyer then suggested that someone more reasonable accompany the lady. I volunteered: first of all, I couldn't miss such an opportunity, and secondly, I might learn some new circumstances of what was happening.
The investigator welcomed us with open arms, joking that we would get leniency for our confession. He showed us some printouts, supposedly logs of numbers from the pool. After a psychological evaluation, he offered to resolve the matter peacefully by compensating the company for the claimed damages of several hundred thousand rubles.
Vova's mom agreed to this immediately, without discussion. Moreover, she had prepared for that exact outcome, urgently selling some property, almost her apartment. A very small part of the amount was later compensated to her by the other participants in the scheme, but most of them disappeared.
In the end of this story, we met with the company representatives, Vova's mom handed over the money, the investigator tore up the statement, and everyone went their separate ways.
Of course, Vova was expelled for poor academic performance. He was reinstated and got expelled again several times, never really advancing beyond the second year â but he was fine with it.
Freebies never change
If you think that what happened taught anyone anything, I will laugh in your face right through the monitor. Just after the 'shildovskaya' incident faded from memory, another one happened, hardly less significant.
Hereâs what you need to know: in addition to pre-paid subscriber access, Volgatelecom had a post-paid long-distance modem pool in Ulyanovsk. It's a convenient option if you donât have money in your account right now but are willing to pay double the cost for the connection.
Once again, a rumor about freebies appears on the local forum: a login for this pool, allowing access only to the local Volga Telecommunications network (Volgans, does your heart skip a beat at the mention of 'Simix'?); but itâs free, somewhat like the guest access weâre already familiar with. The Volgatelecom network is home to hundreds and thousands of ADSL subscribers, with plenty of FTP, chats, P2P, and, who knows, gateways to ICQ! To freeloaders, this felt no different than regular internet.
Of course, you could have accessed the tariff section of the VT website to find all the information about this access. It was cheap, three to four times less than the standard pay-per-use service, but still not free. Therefore, for a while, the login was used fairly cautiously. But when bills didnât arrive for a month or two... People got hooked: almost the entire city logged onto the 'free local network,' using it was taken for granted. Phones were busy around the clock, gigabytes of memes were downloaded, complete digital freedom! And it wasn't just kidsâthere were plenty of adults, too.
As you might guess, VT handled the situation in its own way. About six months after the rumor, people received bills for the entire period. The totals were staggering, unimaginable even to the 'shields'; darkness fell upon the glorious city of Dimitrovgrad, cries and moans filled its walls!
Since I was cautious this time and didnât get caught up in it, I observed the story more from the sidelines. But the story was heavily discussed in the local press and, naturally, on the local network: more than a thousand people fell victim to a scamânothing else I can call this situationâand it stirred public outcry. Apparently, there were court cases and disputes for some time, debtors had their phones cut off, and they cursed the 'wobble'; in the end, the parties came to termsâpart of the debt was forgiven, part was settled collectively.
However, I directly witnessed another part of the events that didn't make it to the newspapers. Those who were financially involved needed a scapegoat: the author of the original leak was a perfect fit for this role. They tracked down his address, and a vigilante group set out to stage a lynching. In real life, the fearsome online warrior turned out to be a dull schoolboy, whom no one bothered to beat up.
Adventures with 'Vobla'
By around 2005, VolgaTelecom's ADSL finally reached our city, and I connected to it as soon as I had the chance. Not that there were no other xDSL providers before that, but their services were unaffordable for individuals. With VolgaTelecom, it was easier: although the connection and traffic costs were quite noticeable, the local resources mentioned earlier were indeed free. Moreover, the availability of such resources was practically announced in advertisementsâjoin us, and you will have access to our three-terabyte FTP archive!
This is exactly why people signed up. On 'Fex', that very file-sharing service, there was truly everything a geek of that time could wish for. Fresh game images, movie rips, cracked software, music, porn! Why would you even need the internet with such riches? Of course, some trivial amount of external traffic was included in the subscription fee, but you had to pay extra based on tricky schemes, depending on who VolgaTelecom had peering arrangements with. Some resources were extremely cheap, while for others, you could easily be charged several rubles per megabyte. The main hustle revolved around 'Fex' and 'external traffic'.
Let's say, after being lured in by sweet advertisements, you found out that the file-sharing service was largely illegal and that no such resource officially existed. And since that's the case, its availability was not guaranteed. The server was constantly offline, and when it did come back up, due to the number of users trying to access it, it was impossible to work with. Once, a particularly clever client wrote a complaint to VolgaTelecom's management: how come they promised me pirated content and porn, where is it all? The admin got a scolding (for hosting an illegal resource) and threatened to shut down the file-sharing service.
But that wasnât a solution either: people were going specifically for the 'fix'! So they decided to reduce the number of public connections to the server and remove sections with adult content and piracy. But it was still possible to buy an account from the admin for unrestricted access. However, I doubt that he profited from it â very soon, p2p services flooded the network where you could download anything you wanted.
And so, there's another part linked to p2p that constantly sparks hysteria on the net. Torrents, if left unrestricted, will download from any peers found via DHT. And as I mentioned, external traffic was dangerously expensive. Although there were detailed instructions on how to configure a firewall and downloader for local use â who actually reads those instructions? So every day on the local forum, we would see desperate threads like 'I got hit by traffic'/'I accessed outside, my parents will kill me'/'I didnât do anything, why?!'. Many fell victim multiple times, but letâs not blame them â ask yourself, could you survive in such chaos?
After a couple of years, VT finally began to introduce some kind of unlimited service. Of course, it took users organizing flash mobs and protests outside the provider's office for it to happen. Can you imagine that?
Ulyanovsk residents are on their knees begging for unlimited internet.
The tearful complaints worked, but there wouldnât have been a , if everything were fair. Customers were promised access speeds, say, in megabits, but in reality, they received 128 kilobits at best. When a customer complained, they received a standard response: speed was promised UP TO a megabit, everything was compliant! This kind of deception had just emerged, but it was quickly adopted by almost all providers.
But thatâs not all! As soon as you managed to download a couple of gigabytes at this speed, it would drop lower and lower, down to mere kilobits. The waves of hatred it generated are beyond words; sometimes that hatred led to complaints to the FAS, the agency would conduct an inspection, during which VT would lift all restrictions â and then turn off the tap again.
Ulyanovsk had to put up with it â but not Dimitrovgrad. The local admin either didn't want to impose limits or the equipment wouldn't allow it â but in our town, everyone had their fair six to eight megabits even on the most restricted unlimited plans.
But what should you do if you didn't even have money for that? Well, if you had the brains and no conscience, you could pull off an operation to get yourself an external channel.
When connecting, all clients were provided with the same D-Link modem with outdated firmware. By default, the modem was set to router mode, so its console and admin interface were exposed to the network. Scanning the network for such modems was quite an elementary task; brute-forcing access to the console was harder, but still possible. Beyond that, it required a fair amount of skill. You had to:
Log into the modem and put it into firmware update mode. This would open a TFTP server on it.
Instead of firmware, upload a proxy binary to the limited free space of the modem's flash memory. You had to write and compile the binary yourself or know where to get it.
Move the uploaded file to /bin, set its execution rights, and configure it to autostart in init.
Reboot the modem into normal mode.
If everything was done correctly â you would get a hole to the outside, while the victim of the hack would receive an even more limited channel, at best. At worst, they would "get hit by external traffic."
To defend against this menace, it was enough to switch the modem to bridge mode, or update the firmware â the update already included protection against brute-forcing. There were stories about other hacking methods surfacing later, but I no longer know about those â by that time, I had moved to Samara, where completely different stories unfolded. .
P.S.
After I told these stories in my , I received a couple of comments from someone who was part of those events. With their permission, I will enhance my story with them, as they fit perfectly:
Before the unlimited plans, there was another unofficial hack at VT â you could set the forum's IP address as a proxy, specifying port 80, and access the outside world through local traffic. When it crashed again for some reason, someone called VT, complained, and they shut down everyone's free access, even giving the admin a hard time. The network bandits seriously wanted to find that guy to punish him for such stupidity; one guy even offered to go somewhere with someone to "talk it over."
And here's another story, this one personal: back in the 'pre-unlimited' days, I wrote a traffic meter that counted (but didn't block) external traffic in real time. There was a feature â you could download a list of local IP addresses from VT's web page, and the program had a built-in automatic updater for that. I even created a website for the program, describing it as a "traffic counting program that tracks external traffic, with lists configured for VT." And then someone complained that it counted incorrectly, and that 'someone' found nothing smarter to do than report it to VT â like, "here's your program, it's counting wrong, give me my money back!" And VT was already sending me letters with threats, like, "what the hell." Well, I got the signal, took down the site, and threw the source code onto the forum, saying something like I'm not responsible for it.
Is there anyone here who was around during the times of 'Winfy', 'Dgrade', 'Simix'? Or maybe you have your own networking stories you're not ashamed to share? Did you ever carry pwl from unprotected network shares in the local network? Did you scan the provider's subnet and then have to explain yourself to the admin? Did you spend sleepless nights chatting with dozens of other oddballs?
Share your memories because it was awesome.
Source: habr.com
