This was presented at Defcon 25. It's the story of Israel changing from a low-tech nation into the high-tech powerhouse of today through the lens of hacking, cracking and phreaking.
Eden: Asi ran 1MC, biggest warez site
Guy Guzner and I met on X.25
Lior and Omri ran BBSes
Yair on on IRC #coders
Yaniv was called LSlasher and ran Lyrics Inn
Analyzer - was not busted yet
Deri Schreibman - publishing hack snippets
Inbar & I are yours truly.
Inbar: ONE COUNTRY - ONE FLOPPY – stats about the country
Numbers - 98% piracy
Rationalization - general revolt against perceived high prices, and why actually not?
Copy Protection and bypass - We like the challenge - Gets covered later in “Cracking”
Eden: Israeli culture:
Disrespect for authority
Willingness to fail
“live today as there might be no tomorrow”
1% can write the book in the US 99% follow up, vs. Israel 40 can write it 60% don’t follow
Eden: We are talking about the late 80s and early 90s.
A great period,
No Israeli computer law
No filters on phone trunks
Very slow (if any) Internet
Inbar: Founded 1982 (!!)
- Few landlines, up to 5 years waiting time for a landline
- Prices and surge pricing (intl. calls)
- Technologies (rotary vs. touch-tone)
Reference: https://www.iucc.ac.il/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/NRG-20Years-H.pdf
https://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/hitb05/BT-Raoul-Chiesa-X25-Security.pdf
https://www.scribd.com/doc/6800297/%D7%A1%D7%A4%D7%A8-%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%A6%D7%94
Inbar
This was used to access some of the services - my private collection
Inbar: Before we jump in, lets get our terms right
Inbar: Before we jump in, lets get our terms right
Inbar
Inbar: call waiting had just come out and the interrupt sound would break the BBS connection. A hack circulated that you would auto-forward incoming calls to your self, which would end in the incoming call being dropped. Early Bezeq bug caused the switchboard to crash with buffer overflow due to recursion.
Eden
Calls are super expensive, especially abroad
Bezeq claiming that 9,600 baud will burn their lines
The ICCA vs. Excellnet wars
Hacking file transfer protocols in order to not get credited for downloads
http://gallery.achituv.com/index.php/Hagiler/BBS
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/research/alon.shalita/stuff/A-LIST.182.txt
http://56k.co.il/site/?p=78
Eden: Yaniv Taigman – Lyrics Inn
CNet and Ultinet fighting who is the better “free” network.
Inbar: TheDraw screen shot by Inbar Raz!
http://gallery.achituv.com/index.php/Hagiler/BBS
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/research/alon.shalita/stuff/A-LIST.182.txt
http://56k.co.il/site/?p=78
Inbar: Denial of Service attack, but attacker forgot CallerID on. Police involved, recommended talking to attacker’s parents. Met again in the army.
First DoS in Israel history. Also: stealing content, cheating ratios
Eden: Move from the techies to “organized” networks
Want to take over the network
How do you do it when 13?
Start a council. Needs an ethics committee.
Early entry into how you run boards
Prominent people: Eran Tromer, Inbar Raz
Inbar: The Story of Avital
Eden: Stuck in our little pond in Israel
How do we go global?
Eden: Compare bandwidths between the countries
Incompetence of a monopoly
So we understand we need to take care of ourselves
Inbar: Compuserv “evaluation” accounts taking 30 days to clear credit cards.
Eden: Israel was the biggest user of “eval accounts”. story of Fin.
Inbar: Friends who were operators
No OPSEC whatsoever back then
Eden No filters meant the obvious thing.
Cheap - $3 per minute to the US
AND untraceable
Eden: This is 92, well after US didn’t have Blue boxing
Greetings to Amos Keron - still unknown who that is after all these years.
Mid and South America were especially vulnerable to blueboxing from Israel.
Inbar: Another way to get outside was X.25
Inbar: Various prefixes for various country, but we hardly ever used out own country’s…
Inbar: One of the first chat servers in history. Many many Israelis.
Inbar: [Global] out dials, used for calling and also harassing
Eden: Technion the Israeli MIT
Fork bomb on t2 crashing it to gain postponement of homework
/bin/login on t2 was replaced to accept the password “fu*ckyou” for any user
t2 hash for default password
Mashbir burner - the original hacker posted on a BBS list to clear their tracks.
Gil Bin Noon of Dataserv.
Inbar: No Internet. We bought books. Later came code snippets etc (Pascal SWAG, 80xxx snippets)
Inbar
Inbar
Inbar: Edition 6 isn't found on the internet!
Inbar
Edition 6 isn't found on the internet!
Inbar: Repurposing data between games allowed you to play the other game’s terrains.
Eden
Biggest warez site in israel. The distribution of the single floppy.
Hooked demos before the games, similar to how virii worked
Instrumented the code and found which bytes to change to JMP
Alas – they added self modifying code, decryption on the fly
We hooked the code (Int 10) to change it after decryption
Eden
Inbar
Inbar Reached out to alex, via snailmail, and he asked that I don’t spread it. Didn’t even give it to eden.
Eden Tried to steal it, no luck, therefore had to resort to writing own tools
Eden: It’s all about an arms race
The story of OpenAll (vs. Untiny)
HaSP - the “cracking group” (of 1) and HASP by Aladdin
Eden:
I was the iCE coding coordinator, recruited Israelis. Tom Tsarfati (Simplee),
Same time, Ohad (Chegg), Nitzan (Yahoo) and Tomer were unknown to us. Major demo scene participation in Israel
Movement demo party
Tomer Gabel - Pulse
Erez Eisen - now with Infected Mushrooms
Inbar: A virus which hooked int 13 and appended swear words after the names of teachers. Propagated too much. No attribution.
Inbar: Glad Japhet - "Virus Buster", hired by Yuval Rakavy and now-Jerusalem-mayor Nir Barkat of BRM, back in 1992.
Inbar: My private collection
Inbar: My private collection
Inbar and Uzi Apple/Yuval Tal VirusBuster [http://virus.wdfiles.com/local--files/wdef/virlv2.256]
Inbar
Inbar
Inbar: Key discussion in Israel at the time was staying ethical.
Eden
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/פרשת_הסוס_הטרויאני_(ישראל)
Inbar
לאחר שהוגש נגדו כתב אישום בארה"ב, הואשם ההאקר בן ה-18 מאשקלון גם בישראל: איים על מטוס של קבוצת ה-NBA בוסטון סלטיקס, התריע על פצצה במטוס "אל-על" והזהיר בכיר לשעבר במשרד ההגנה האמריקני כי יחטוף את ילדיו ויהרוג אותם
Inbar: The new generations take knowledge from IDF, but the old guys _brought_ knowledge to the IDF.
Inbar And so started the commercialization of technologies and experience gathered in the IDF
Eden
Eden
Eden Guy Guzner just sold Fireglass to Symantec for $250M
My fund invested in Lior Sion, who was also the CTO of Gett
Omri is an entrepreneur and was Inbar’s boss
Yair Goldfinder sold ICQ, Dotomi and is now building AppCard
Yaniv Taigman told face.com to Facebook and is a lead AI researcher
Analyzer got caught again, and again, and again. Went to jail in the US,
Demi is Hola
and Erez…. Musicians have all the fun.
Eden: Israeli culture:
Disrespect for authority
Willingness to fail
“live today as there might be no tomorrow”
That’s the culture we have we conveyed through the stories