To be honest... I don’t really even remember where it all started... it's been years now, and all of this has settled, so I might as well tell some stories.
Somewhere along my journey through AOL/Kraproom/Observers/AOLFiles I joined up with a guy many of you know, Viowatch, and we went on a tear through a bunch of things. Here’s just a couple notable ones that were fun...
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I'm sure many of you know of token scanning and the absurd method of security by obscurity that AOL used, like viewruling keywords, but not the actual forms that those keywords lead to... ect. Viowatch and I were token scanning one night and ran across an interesting form. It looked like some kind of website publishing tool.
We didn’t exactly know what or where the HTML displayed there went to, as the form was rather plain and didn’t have much information. Upon doing an actual publish, the form popped up a browser window to an FTP site with a login and password in the form of
ftp://user:pass@ftp.server.com... In this case the FTP server was actually ftp.aol.de. We were publishing directly to
www.aol.de through this ridiculous form.
Complete idiocy. We couldnt believe it.
Needless to say, the form was killed pretty quickly after we had discovered it, and the login to aol.de changed. A lot of people ask me what the username/password was to the FTP server... I don’t remember exactly which was the username or the password, but one was "publish" and one was "blueaol" ... lame, but pretty much exactly what you would have expected.
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Some of you may remember a webiste named 3char.org. This was yet another fairly lame AOL website that I created with Kenton and Viowatch. For the most part we didn't post anything too revolutionary. An exploit here or there, some software we ran into from time to time. Nothing amazing.
During one of our token scans we ran across a form of what looked like internal-only AOL builds that were in development. On this form we found what was the first working AOL build for OS X. We also found a pre-release build of the next major AOL drop (I think it was AOL 7). We also found something that looked pretty innocuous, a build of AOL 5 that had the embedded Internet Explorer ripped out and replaced with an imbedded Netscape browser. Mostly, we were excited we found the OS X build. It was something no one had really seen yet, and it looked to be pretty bad ass, and I personally had a machine running OS X, so I was looking forward to trying it out.
What we didn't realize was the AOL 5 build with Netscape imbedded was going to attract some serious attention from AOL. We didn’t know that this software was a precursor to the announcement that AOL was going to buy Netscape, and break it's ties with Microsoft and the imbedded version of IE. The result was OpsSec basically hunting me down. They called my house, they called my office, they called my cell phone, which was a well guarded number that I am still not sure how they obtained, and they even called my university trying to locate me. Not to mention the Cease and Desist letter they overnighted to me which I received the following day.
cnet news article:
http://padillac.com/padillac/komodo/komodo-cnet.htm
c&d transcript:
http://padillac.com/padillac/komodo/cease.htm
opssec message left on pacman's answering machine:
http://kraproom.com/pacman/opssec.mp3
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