Hacker Perspective: Hristo Gueorguiev

by Hristo (Izo) Gueorguiev

They shutdown MSN to our side of the world, it's because of kids like us.  We used to brag.  No matter, we'd jump on the x.25 networks from some random gateway and we still had AOL, CompuServe and even GEnie, boy were downloads fast with GEnie.

Me, I never paid for Internet my whole teenage life, neither did anybody in my clique of friends.  Not that we or our families could have.  For what it cost, you could have fed a family of four.  But we were hungry for knowledge, we needed hardware specs, driver descriptions, demo scene source code and it was all on there, on the net.

So we got on there in the way we knew how.  We had no money, but we had modems and we had credit card generators.  Hell, we wrote a few and we had know-how.  Mostly, we had a hunger.

I guess it all started with a book.  I'd be damned if I remember the name.  Saw it in a book store when I was just a wee little lad on family on vacation.  My parents, quite happy I was expressing interests in reading, purchased it for me.  The book featured a curious little boy, much like me, so easy to relate and his new pal, a computer.  I had seen those in the movies.

I did find the book name after all.
Roughly translates to Let's Play with the Computer.

Didn't fully understand it on the first read.  Nevertheless, I felt enlightened.  I was hooked and there was no going back.  Before you knew it, I was a member of the after-school computer club.  Writing, or rather attempting to write, BASIC code on the Eastern Block-built Apple ][ clones.  The more I learned, the more I understood how these magical things, these computers, worked, the more I needed to know.  There was always something more on a lower-level that made them tick.  I needed to know.

Skip a few years ahead and there I was making "hidden" DOS directories with non-printable characters on a Cyrillic keyboard.  After a few more came Turbo Pascal and C, 8086 assembly.  Sure.  Had to learn it.  After all, how else do you learn how to code viruses?  Well, that and undeleting a password-protected AIN archive from a school computer.

Oh, did I mention by then I was in a high school with a computer-focused accelerated education?  Two of the upper-classmen were quite heavy in to the DOS virus creation scene, if you will.  I wanted in on the knowledge too.  How heavy, you ask?  Let's just say we referred to the PC 286 equipped computer lab as the Nevada testing grounds.  Stick your SD floppy disks in at your own risk.  I personalty never took the "condom" sticker off of the write protect tab.

After a little social engineering, I had both an archive with source codes and the password to it.  Interestingly enough, my elder schoolmate whose code I stolen wasn't really upset.  Rather, all of a sudden I was in.  Another year and we were fast friends.  And not just him.

Somehow, through the old hand-to-hand distribution network, I had gotten a hold of some video game source codes, among other things.  All done by a talented programmer, our age, from a different school.  There was a home phone number in the header comments, not too many cell phones then.  So, naturally I called.  He, of course, was quite surprised that a collection of his hard work was out in the wild.  Be he too became our friend.  Others followed, so we had crew.

Even gave ourselves a name.  We coded custom Trojans and graphic demos.  We broke into BBS system just to discover, on closer look, that the sys-op had written ones of their own.  We'd call and make more friends, accumulate more knowledge.

At the time for us, light recreational reading when we wanted to relax were the virus descriptions in the F-Prot database.  The expression of our fashion sense, what window manager we chose to use for MS Windows 3.1.  Our religion, OS2 or Linux.

The National Computer Institute, home of the back then infamous Bulgarian Anti-Virus Lab, left tens of their ISS servers not updated.  That is, until we shut them down for a few hours and told them.

No, I didn't have the printed manual that went along with Electronic Arts' LHX Attack Chopper.  No, I couldn't answer the security question.  I had a debugger, no need to know what word was written at the bottom corner of the page = random(seed), or was it the top?  Neither did anybody else from then on who got their hands on the patch file I made.

We didn't just hack (crack, whichever, pick a word), we hacked hacking tools.  Imagine a debugger designed primarily to help create cheats for games being used to break the copy protection of Sorcerer Decompiler.  An aptly named piece of software which, when fed an executable file, would return a source code in 8086 assembly language.  It took a few hours, just couldn't find the hex string I was searching for in the executable file.  Well, until it hit me that they had used an executable compressor, not once, but twice.  Security through obscurity.  Really, of all people, the good folks at whatever firm published Sorcerer Decompiler should have known better.

We looked for challenges and even made our own.  Sure, you can write this or that in Turbo C.  Now let me see you do it with just a batch file and Norton Batch Enhancer.  Sure, we could tell you at what offset Sid Meier's Colonization stores gold in the save file.  Want a sandworm when playing House Atreides in Dune II?  No problem.  All you needed for that one was a text editor and some common sense.

Sysadmins of a large Bulgarian ISP told us their AIX mainframe was unhackable.  Challenge taken.  After overloading a few analog lines with calls, we manged to hijack a session - I read it was possible on some board.  Lucky for us, telecom still had the ancient Soviet Bloc switching system.  Just like that, we were a few escape charters and a shell away from an unshadowed password file.  A few days of brute force on a work computer and we had hundreds of accounts.  We emailed it to them.  They were still kicking our ass in Doom deathmatch.  But their gloating was no longer the same.

Oh, did I mention Doom?  Two in the morning, house phone rings.  I jump and grab the handset in my room before it wakes the rents.  "You won't believe what John Romero's head says..." my friend yells on the other side of the line.  He, of course, is referring to the now famous Easter egg on the end level of Doom II.  He is understandably unable to contain his excitement.  After all, you couldn't just jump on YouTube and look it up then.  He did it the old fashioned way, by hours of parsing though sound sections of the huge WAD file with a wave editor.

This kind of hunger breeds its own dedication, focus, and curiosity.  It's a different kind of OCD.  As kids say nowadays, you can't buy that s***.

We coded, from games to cracks that gave you infinite resources in games.  From viruses to anti-viruses.  Trojans to graphic demos.  We terrorized the first web chats with ASCII art bots we made.  We phished credit cards on AOL with fake software upgrades that promised unlimited access.  We pirated software we couldn't afford but wanted to learn, and we supported open-source in its infancy.

But we also always told.  We raised red flags and we warned.  And the problems got fixed.  We never damaged things and we attempted to leave them as they were, as much as possible.  Well, O.K., we almost always told, but one thing is for sure: we were always learning.

I guess for me, and the kids like me, it was a strange time.  A time and place where the conditions were just right for this kind of learning.  Where we could come back to school Monday morning and not get in trouble for having accidentally rewired the principal's line to a different building.  A time and place where simply switching it back and explaining that we had needed more bandwidth was enough.  He even gave us an extra line after that.  A time when Communism had fallen but Capitalism hadn't quite made itself at home.  A time when the Internet was blooming for the first time and cybercrime was just barely starting to make mainstream news.  A place where the old structure was down but the new one was not quite rigid, and the home PC was about to really hit its mark.  We had a little extra elbow room.  We were lucky.

I guess the whole thing started with a clock.  A few of them, to be exact, that I took apart while my parents weren't watching, just to see how they worked.  Long before that book and long before I could put them back together.  The parents weren't thrilled, but they were the kind of people who understood.  So was grandpops, who actually got me a tool set of my own.  By then, they had caught on that I should be watched on what I was using them for.

I was late for class; the teacher was new and quite young.  She wasn't particularly apt at handling teenage boys, especially when they were bored because of having to spend six weeks learning MS Word.  And this was the computer-accelerated class, which happened to be mostly boys.  She asked why I was late.  I told her I had already learned that part of Word.  The teacher, of course, questioned that as I didn't even know what she was teaching that day.  She said if I could take the end of the class quiz and pass it, I could leave then.  But I would have to take the grade I got, no matter what.  I passed and got an "A."  On the way out, I chirped, "That's what the help files are for."  She shouted back at me, unable to keep a smile from showing, "Smartass!"

I guess unlike my parents or our principal, the education system as a whole didn't catch on.  It failed to focus our attention.  It didn't direct us into productive expression, but bored us instead.  It didn't feed our hunger for knowledge but had us chasing a carrot.  All the things we did were all before we were even 18.  We were kids.  We found our own way to feed the hunger and learn.  As with all kids, it was slightly misguided.  Well, really downright criminal sometimes.  Most kids do drugs.  We did computers... and more.  We were high on knowledge.

There is a lot of talk about morality and social responsibility.  A lot of labels are being thrown around.  White hat.  Black hat.  Hackers.  Crackers.  Thinkers.  What's forgotten is that with the exception of a few bad apples (or latkes or whatever), most of hacking is done by the kids whose thoughts are a little too fast to follow the carrot.  They'd rather take the stick apart.

Not for the good of something or someone, not to hurt anybody.  Not for wealth or unfair advantage.  Not to feel special.  No, but instead to feed the hunger.  The hunger for knowledge that underlies their every action.  Simply to know.  Know as much as possible.

In the end, most all find ways to feed the hunger constructively.  Thanks to them, we have smartphones, Firefox, and Google.  Thanks to them, we get to keep enjoying our freedom of speech and expression.  Those kids are the tech innovators, the start-up visionaries, and the activist lawyers.

So I guess it all started with a primate somewhere in the dark jungles of an ancient continent.  A place where the rules were few, new knowledge abundant, and the opportunity for hacking endless.  The hunger, well the hunger has been deep ever since.