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The door was basically left wide open. You could do whatever you wanted with ease.

literally ran a basic wardialer in my area code and had guest access to multiple government systems. I felt like matthew broderick would have been so proud.

I never got anywhere but it freaked my parents out they were not proud like i had been expecting at all.

Never actually messed around with anything besides figuring out the no password guest accounts so not really thrilling but it was super easy to get access.

Also when email was first a thing you could just telnet to port 25 on a server and write raw SMTP messages and most servers would just accept them. You would say yes this message is coming from [email protected] and it would say sure thing!

It was fun, indeed. People knew so little about the implications and possibilities of connecting two systems, that even if you didn’t hack anything worthwhile, it was easy to feel like a genius simply by war-dialing into another local nerd’s own Commodore 64.

Leader: "Alright, while he's working on breaking into their system, we'll--"

Hacker: "I'm in."

Leader: "That fast? Did you find some zero-day to exploit?"

Hacker who just tried username "admin", password "password": "Yyyyeeeeeees?"

It would’ve been amazing to be part of the culture back in the days of phreaking.

Until your mom grounded you for hogging the phone line.