Phrack Magazine

http://phrack.org/issues/69/1.html

by 0x737368 • 5 years ago

249 106 5 years ago

phrack.org

Bluestein• 5 years ago

Ah! A classic :)

ArtWomb• 5 years ago

Worth introducing to a new generation ;)

If you want a representative article to sample, let it be Strauss' "The Fall of Hacking Groups". A lament for the subculture of yore:

http://phrack.org/issues/69/6.html

Previous HN discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8734737

grep_name• 5 years ago

New generation here, where can I go to find people who still value the old hacker ethos? I'm not even that young (28), but never encountered these groups when I was younger and my preferences and values surrounding technology have always put me slightly out of step with my peer group

turbografx164• 5 years ago

I'm also a younger hacker and I have the same issue. I've found 0x00sec.org is alright, and security CTF forums can be decent, but there's an awful lot of people just looking for easy answers and aren't interested in learning or sharing knowledge.

profquail• 5 years ago

The 2600 Magazine community is still alive and well:

https://www.2600.com/

Communitivity• 5 years ago

Has this now been reclaimed by hackers? If so, that is great news. It used to be an amazing source of information, back when Tarod and Knight Lightning ran things. Then it slowly seemed to get taken over/become for the cyber-security professional crowd. The P.H.I.R.M. publications are great reading too. gatech.edu used to have an archive of all the old Phrack issues somewhere, and more, but I've no idea if it's still there.

tptacek10• 5 years ago

A lot of those people from the KL days were security professionals.

scienceman• 5 years ago

I think there’s an implication difference between security professionals and cyber-security professionals.

segmondy• 5 years ago

Once the editor changed from an individual to "The Phrack Staff" it kinda lost it's charm. I also take it as a sign of the times tho, folks who needed to earn a living couldn't risk being strongly associated with the zine. Folks also began self publishing on their own sites/blog and bugtraq really became the place to publish your CVE... It was fun while it lasted. I'm sure the new & current gen have their own idea of the "in thing".

tptacek10• 5 years ago

I can't think of any time since the mid-1990s where being affiliated with Phrack would have jeopardized a high-status career in software security.

turbografx164• 5 years ago

Where are the hackers hanging out these days? 5 or so years ago /r/netsec was pretty good, and 0x00sec seems a decent (if small) community.

I miss having a place to hang out with other people messing around with random security projects and CTFs...

bynxbynx2• 5 years ago

I help run the OpenToAll CTF team - while the primary focus for most are CTFs, the community (>500) has really expanded, e.g., (in the slack workspace) we have active channels for N-day repros, bug bounties with internal competitions, financial trading shop talk, and hardware hacking. You wont find much OTR or blackhat stuff ( due to slack ToS), but Ive found the community loves learning and discussing all things sec.

It doesnt hit your mark completely, but hopefully its somewhat helpful

buzzert• 5 years ago

( due to slack ToS)

With restrictions like that, it surprises me that Slack appeals to hackers at all. Why not IRC?

thegeekbin• 5 years ago

Have any bridge to Matrix? It would be pretty awesome to join.

turbografx164• 5 years ago

Sounds like fun! Ill check it out.

StopTheWorld• 5 years ago

Where are the hackers hanging out these days?

The Admiral's Club at SFO

vehemenz2• 5 years ago

Anyone have any ideas about making an 80-character-wide, plaintext-style website responsive?

I really like the style, but it doesn't work well on phones.

anotheryou2• 5 years ago

in CSS you can do "max-width: 40ch" on smaller devices if you want. For fancy decorations you'd need need to draw them with css and/or pseudo elements.

  pre{ 
  max-width: 40ch !important;
 white-space: normal;
  }

vehemenz2• 5 years ago

Good idea. I didn't know about ch units.

I experimented with setting a fixed vw width, which kinda works, but at the end of the day 80 characters is probably just too much.

giantrobot• 5 years ago

So long as you're actually using HTML (and not literal plain text) all you need to do is add a viewport meta tag:

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

Mobile browsers set the viewport width to a default of 960px (Android might be a little different from iOS). That's why a plain text file displays so poorly on mobile. It's rendering to a pixel width larger than the display (and zoomed to fit).

For the "plain text" look set the font family to monospace. Bam readable and responsive "plain text" look.

_joel• 5 years ago

A blast from the past! Reading those articles back in the day definitely piqued my interest computers and telephony.

rootsudo• 5 years ago

The old zines, inspired me so much, I'm fortunate that I was able to get tons of blacklisted411, phrack and 2600 in my youth. :)

bluetwo• 5 years ago

This just had me thinking about 2600. A bookstore on South Street in Philly used to carry it on their racks.

greenie_beans• 5 years ago

They just released a new issue: http://store.2600.com/collections/2010-2015/products/new-iss...

downtime-vam• 5 years ago

I have a lifetime subscription to 2600. Still going strong!

j4yav3• 5 years ago

They still publish pay phone photos in the back, I’ve managed to get several in there over the years.

goshx3• 5 years ago

For those not familiar with it, Phrack was teaching how to exploit buffer overflows back in 1996 [1]. This is still relevant today and required for some certifications in cyber security like the OSCP.

[1] http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html

goshx3• 5 years ago

Also worth mentioning the Hacker’s Manifesto from 1986: http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

rtuin• 5 years ago

Such a classic.

One of my favorite things ever written.

xtracto• 5 years ago

Also notable that The Mentor (Loyd) actually participates (or used to participate) here in Hacker News. I had a brief starstuck moment when he commented here in another thread in the past.

I was so identified by this in the early 1990s because I was very lonely in my small town in a developing country where nobody cared about computers and programming. As I got access to the internet I finally found a sense of belonging.

freedomben2• 5 years ago

Phrack's article on buffer overflows on the stack was incredible back in the day. It taught me more about how computers work than any class in University. I referred back to it for years for understanding how programs actually run. Will always have a soft spot for that.

Animats• 5 years ago

"The Tao of Windows Buffer Overflow"? That was Cult of the Dead Cow, not Phrack.

dagw2• 5 years ago

Probably thinking of "Smashing the stack for fun and profit"

smrq• 5 years ago

"Smashing the stack" was required reading for the final lab project of a 300-level course at IU. As a TA for that class I saw it go right over lots of people's heads. When I took the class myself, I was the only one to finish the assignment (implement a basic buffer overflow attack over serial on some embedded system); the first time I taught that lab, only one person finished as well. Everyone who finished really got it, though. I'll always have fond memories of that article.

kleer001• 5 years ago

Would someone more knowledgeable than me sketch out the relationship between Phrack and 2600? I think someone here knows it off the top of their head.

amenghra2• 5 years ago

A classic, been around since 1985.

https://github.com/deadbits/Zines used to be an archive of tons of similar ezines, the repo has been disabled ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Some of the zines it used to have include HITB, PhineasFisher, TeaMp0isoN, ZF0, anti-anti-sec, anti-sec, b4b0, dikline, el8, h0no, htp, owned and exposed, phrack, pocorgtfo, uninformed.

On a more modern note, https://pagedout.institute/ is great.

DrPhish• 5 years ago

40hex was one of my favourites back in the day, but it was focused purely on virii

It was fascinating get an unvarnished look inside that world, complete with ethical/political discussion and of course source code with annotations!

amenghra2• 5 years ago

Love that 40hex was "raw" with little editorial (aS wELL aS pOSTS wITH iNVERTED cASE). E.g.

    XOR is a matamatical function that can be used to cifer and decifer data with the same key.

Some of the code comments are pure gold.

tptacek10• 5 years ago

Some of the 40hex people turned into pretty hardcore vulnerability researchers (at least by 1990s standards).

mhitza• 5 years ago

If you didn't read 29A I highly recommend it. It was even more technical, but I enjoyed it along with 40Hex.

homarp• 5 years ago

https://files.awknode.com/zines/ seems to be a mirror

dang• 5 years ago

If curious, past threads:

Phrack Magazine (1985-2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18288767 - Oct 2018 (73 comments)

Phrack 69 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11644340 - May 2016 (56 comments)

Phrack Issue #68 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3841721 - April 2012 (50 comments)

Phrack Magazine's classic article on OS/kernel development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2583591 - May 2011 (3 comments)

Phrack 66 (June 2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=744821 - Aug 2009 (9 comments)

Phrack #66 is out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652545 - June 2009 (14 comments)

Those are all about Phrack in general. I omitted threads about specific articles, except one because it's short and has a fun comment.

Ansil849• 5 years ago

Some more old-school H/P/V/A/C (man, I miss seeing that acronym pop up on sites, anyone else?) zines: http://textfiles.com/magazines/

And newer-school (90s-00s) zines: http://web.textfiles.com/ezines/

cozzyd• 5 years ago

I was hoping there'd be a new issue :(

k1rcher• 5 years ago

This is incredible to read n many years later. I was a per-pubescent adolescent around the time of the publication of the "last great zines", and was only ever really exposed to a small subsection (HTP5, the MIT.edu and Linode incidents) through several mutual friends of mine who were, at the time, enthusiasts of and in the scene.

That era and community was without a doubt the foundation for who I am today as a young adult, and who I strive to be in all aspects of life. I have and no doubt will continue to consume all of this content I may have missed out on since then.

P.S. If I may call your attention to volume 0x0f, 0x45, part A of section 6 (Notes); wow. This, along with everything else, is enormously prophetic, profound, and intriguin:

"--[ 6 - Notes

A) In respect to social networks, while they are a valid community-building mechanism in nature, selfishness prevails in common usage, by means of the indulgent pleasure that fuels chronic "pluggedness", at times voyeur, at times exhibitionist and needy."

- http://phrack.org/issues/69/6.html

ryanlol3• 5 years ago

Money killed hacker groups, I suppose the rise of cryptocurrency is to blame for dealing the final blow.

Almost all of us involved in the creation of HTP5 were children, few of us cared about money. It didn’t seem attainable at the time anyway, just something fraudsters from third world countries dealt with.

I think bitcoin changed this, now there’s a clear mechanism that enables anyone to profit from their crimes without having real life contacts or dealing with insecure services like liberty reserve.

If I were to get root@Linode again I’d certainly have far more lucrative targets in mind than rival IRC networks.

The great blackhats from groups like Ac1db1tch3z became billionaires by hacking bitcoin exchanges. It’s obvious why nobody is making zines anymore. The hackers claiming to not care about money were almost without exception children or just pretending to not care because they didn’t have the answer to “how?”.

nachash2• 5 years ago

You didn't have anything to contribute to HTP5, and you also didn't have root at Linode. My contention is that hacking groups were killed because of informants, such as the one we mentioned at the end of the Linode section. Thoughts?

dagw2• 5 years ago

Hats off to the old Phrack team. I can safely say that I probably wouldn't have this career I have now if it wasn't for Phrack.

mtalantikite2• 5 years ago

Same, Phrack was mind expanding for my teenage self in the 90s. Is there anything similar floating around these days? So much on the Internet seems filtered through corporate platforms that are antithetical to the counter-cultural spirit. Or maybe I'm just old now!

cyberpunk2• 5 years ago

pocorgtfo is pretty good, but it's more aimed at 'weird machines' than just exploit techniques. You can also buy a copy online that comes looking like a bible, which I rather cherish as a possession ;)

TedDoesntTalk• 5 years ago

2600 is still alive and well and STILL mails me a quarterly physical magazine. $250 for a lifetime subscription. The article quality is all over the place.

fny2• 5 years ago

Damn. I was really hoping there was a new article. I started reading these as wee lad back before I knew what a malloc was. Eventually I learned enough to get myself suspended. >:)

Thankfully, I use my knowledge for good nowadays.

Looking forward to the next issue whatever decade it may come.

The paper feed does seem active though! http://phrack.org/papers/escaping_from_freebsd_bhyve.html

EamonnMR• 5 years ago

I'm getting forbidden from that page

fny2• 5 years ago

Fixed

weare138• 5 years ago

Does anyone know if the Phrack team is still active? There hasn't been a new issue since 2016.

icedchai3• 5 years ago

I remember reading Phrack during the early 90's, x.25 hacking days. Anyone remember QSD or Lutzifer? I've long forgotten those NUAs now.

justanother• 5 years ago

0208057040540 is still in finger-memory

tptacek10• 5 years ago

This is a crazy read; I was there (though very young and not well connected) and, just try to get your head around a world in which the Internet was so new and unstable:

http://phrack.org/issues/45/8.html

Also: $300 for an X.25 hookup! I totally could have run an X.25 board!

icedchai3• 5 years ago

Those were fun times, for sure. I got on the Internet fairly early (1991-ish), mostly through not-quite-legit means. Later on I got some jobs at early ISPs and helped a couple others get started. In those days, if you could configure a T1 and set up a couple static routes, you were considered a god.

spacemanmatt2• 5 years ago

I was on QSD and tchh/altger chats. Good times. 0302020400224

bink2• 5 years ago

In those days QSD was far preferable to IRC, even if you were getting propositioned for cyber-sex by European men in every other message.

geenew• 5 years ago

If a link to Phrack is posted, then a link to POC||GTFO should be attached. A spiritual successor.

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

tjpnz• 5 years ago

I remember reading these when I was growing up. I understood very little at the time but it filled my mind with wonder and was one of many things that nudged me towards studying CS.

lucidphreak• 5 years ago

I saw mention of x.25 in the comments below.. Made me swoon... oh the memories.

Phrack Magazine

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