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A comment on Back Orifice (1998). Parent comment

Re:Back Orifice (1998) by s_d on Saturday September 04, 2021 @09:32PM (#28420967)
An interesting bit about the internals and development of the BO code: The BO server was written in C and consisted mostly of a single while(1){ switch(command): ... } loop, the only functions were where callbacks were required, and it reused the same 5 variables in main() for everything. I got feedback from more than one security professional that this made it very difficult to reverse engineer. I think when I was writing it my concern was minimal overhead, and not using the stack must save SOME important resources?

When Dildog wrote BO2k I gave him the BO source to start with, he claims he rewrote everything from scratch and seemed a bit horrified by my code, which was never intended for distribution.

..ooM? ..ooM!

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Re:Back Orifice (1998) by s_d on Saturday September 04, 2021 @09:49PM (#28421039)
The only bug I recall being reported on BO was in the built in HTTP server (which I wrote from scratch in C), if you shared a specific directory with the HTTP server, on Internet Explorer it would not let you click through to sub-directories because of a missing slash at the end I think. I only ever tested it with Firefox which seemed to not care if the slash was present. I found out about this from people who thought it was a feature, and were horrified to find out that anyone COULD access those sub-directories if they manually added the trailing slash or used a different browser.

.ooM.ooF.

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Re:Back Orifice (1998) by anonu on Sunday September 05, 2021 @12:02AM (#28421536)
Was Firefox around in 1998?
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Re:Back Orifice (1998) by umeshunni on Sunday September 05, 2021 @01:51AM (#28421918)
He probably meant Mozilla
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Re:Back Orifice (1998) by grioghar on Saturday September 04, 2021 @09:52PM (#28421050)
You single-handedly made me interested in computers deeper than playing Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. You made a 12th grader who didn’t have a decent computer at home start learning DNS and saving his dollars for a Pentium to start programming on.

I got into so much trouble my Senior year of High School with your software, but it put me on a path.

Your software and NetBus was all I needed. We owned EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING in our town until we got found out. Naive me at the time thought it was really cool, until the Detectives showed up…

Here’s to you. Thank you.

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