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@realhackhistory@chaos.social
mastodon 4.6.9Official Mastodon for hack.history #YouTube channel, covering the #history of #phreaks, #hacking & #hacktivism as well as the portrayal of #hackers in pop culture.
If you are interested in #digitalhumanities, #anthropology, ASCII art, #retrocomputing, tech #histodons toots or just really curious about hackers then there will be content here for you.
Media by humans, for humans.
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Joined November 05, 2022
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These Arch Linux people are getting out of control.
Things that I won’t use, even to mock or joke about it:
* Generative AI
* Incel slang
* MAGA or nazi imagery
I think this is a reasonable boundary.
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Can tell milw0rm is a blast from the past for a lot of people seeing these posts.
Suddenly it is 1998 again, I'm on IRC and usenet and drinking warm jolt cola while my parents yell at me that they need to make a phone call so I need to get offline.
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@PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange I’d also say this needs to be viewed against the backdrop of increased rivalry in the ransomware / extortion scene, less victims are paying and the groups are at each others throats. DragonForce has defaced other groups extortion blog sites in the past for instance, and Russian groups have threatened each other publicly of late in ways they would not previously have.
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@PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange I read it as these kids are fucking nuts and continue to be fucking nuts. They double cross each other and absolutely love drama.
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Internet Archive upload so that it will be properly OCR'd
https://archive.org/details/milw0rm-final
About time for me to remind everyone that:
a) there was a TV series version of The Net in 1998
and
b) Tim goddamn Curry played the voice of a mysterious hacker called Sorcerer in it
Banksy might produce the equivalent of Hallmark greeting cards in terms of subversive art but people should still leave him the fuck alone and let people who want some anonymity in this world of horrible surveillance to have that anonymity, especially given that he isn’t hurting anyone.
oh no who let Microsoft name weed strains oh dear
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Finally I am going to write about Alexey Ivanov & his partner in crime Vasiliy Gorshkov who were breaching U.S. companies from Russia in 2000, offering "consulting" to victims & threatening to delete data from hacked computers and leak sensitive records. This feels like proto-ransomware methodology.
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In parallel I am writing the most complete account of the life, career & crimes of Dr Joseph Popp Jnr, the man everyone agrees created & executed the first ever software based ransomware attack in 1989. I've found the contradictory and missing details of his life frustrating & am going to fix that.
I finally got a chance to see the Joybubbles documentary. I was honestly surprised by how emotional it made me, if you’ve been involved in phreaking or hacking I think you’ll see a little of yourself in Joe. It centers his story and his struggles and his successes, it isn’t a true crime exposé.
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I'm currently writing a #blog about two American #hacker kids who held a U.S. university to ransom via modem in 1980. This was one of the earliest extortion cases involving data or availability of data I had found until I read about people holding tape archives to ransom in the 1970s. I’ll definitely be writing about that too.
Is “Sneakers or Hackers” the “Elvis or the Beatles” of the #hacker world?
“Data is the new oil” is about twenty years old now as a quote, but it feels like with generative AI we are getting to the real fossil fuel analogy.
Not just that the data is valuable like oil, but that corporations will seize and refine it in ways that are damaging to the world and our health.
Boosted by @mansalia@shitpost.poridge.club
I wonder what it means for the future that automated moderation, the online panopticon & Silicon Valley puritanism has shaped a generation of kids who are now afraid to type “sex”, “killed”, “death” or “rape” online without substituting numbers for letters or resorting to language like “unalive”
Does anyone know of a source for 60 Minutes broadcasts from the 70s, like an archive or something? Would love to see this segment "Dial E For Embezzlement" which aired back in 1976.
Big tech companies have hoarded all of our data for years now and are entrusting it all to people who need chatbots to tell them how to do their jobs. This situation is an absolute disaster.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/20/meta-ai-agents-instruction-causes-large-sensitive-data-leak-to-employees
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“The ransom attempt failed, because the bank had in its files duplicates of the stolen tapes.”
Backups have been foiling ransomware operators since the 70s lol
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Also, if you did enough internet crimes back in the day the FBI would archive your website in black and white for you and stick it in a folder in a big filing cabinet somewhere.
Man, kid me would have gone absolutely nuts for this.
https://youtu.be/17jJu1geea8
Some crazy details here:
“convincing the hacker that they actually were the FBI, in part by having the hacker join a video chat where they flashed their law enforcement credentials in front of a web camera”
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/foreign-hacker-2023-compromised-epstein-files-held-by-fbi-source-documents-show-2026-03-11/
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@liaizon very 2000s hackercore but I think that’s a regional thing. A lot of Middle Eastern hackers have what I’d consider antiquated handles for whatever reason.
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@jtompkinsx@hachyderm.io @mausmalone@mastodon.social I did not know that, I need to get the novelization!
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@SadMonk@mstdn.social 🎶 beeedle doo.. BOMP BOMP 🎵
Biometric locks for phones aren’t just convenient for you, they are convenient for the cops.
“explicitly authorized law enforcement personnel to obtain Natanson’s phone and both hold the device in front of her face and to forcibly use her fingers to unlock it”
https://theintercept.com/2026/01/30/washington-post-hannah-natanson-fbi-biometrics-unlock-phone/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter
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@ccc@chaos.social @coldnorth@chaos.social thank you for the hospitality, the music and the tesla excitement!
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@PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange I think there was a definite divide between older and / or more sensible participants and younger and / or more unhinged ones. Around the time those chats got especially chaotic was when that kid turned himself in in Vegas.
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@PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange I mean they were uploading audio clips of themselves doing lines of cocaine and bickered and fought constantly, if they were faking it all it must have been a full time occupation.
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@PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange were you in any of the Scattered Lapsus Shinyhunters chats on Telegram?
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If you remember milw0rm for reasons other than being around the scene at the time you may remember them for a hack of an Indian nuclear research facility that gets attributed to Pakistani hackers for some reason even though milw0rm did literal interviews about doing it.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/india-has-scary-nuke-hack/
I can FOIA, request police records but have zero experience with requesting court docs.
Looking to find a specific set of court records from the United States District Court of Northern District of Ohio and then request those docs. Link on the website is broken:
https://www.ohnd.uscourts.gov/court-records
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@PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange I mean I’m paying attention for sure but assuming that these people have some grand strategy is a mistake I think. People join, people leave, the makeup of these groups and who is in ascendency within them shifts combined with external factors. It makes sense to me they would clash with cl0p, as they are both innovators in the extortion scene.
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@liaizon they are still talking about Bluesky on their Telegram too, no end in sight.
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@PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange there was definitely a shift in how much the people claiming the group name wanted to be in the public eye but more “western” groups with younger members just tend to be like this in my experience. Look at lapsus$, lizard squad, poodle corp, etc etc
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From “Computer Capers: Tales of Electronic Thievery, Embezzlement, and Fraud” by Thomas Whiteside, published in 1978.
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@PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange hell look at what has emerged about the people recently arrested for helping run Team PCP affiliated ops for that matter, these are not well adjusted people.
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I'm going to get this FOIA release up on Internet Archive so it is properly searchable.
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If you guessed “cybercrime law” put in place by an autocratic regime then you win.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/12/british-tourist-among-20-charged-in-dubai-over-videos-of-iranian-missile-strikes