Re:Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
by shaunrussell on Monday December 12, 2022 @11:48PM
(#33964966)
Reminds me of a hack I discovered in school.
I discovered that I could use VBA from Word to shell out to cmd bypassing all of the security. This opened a world of possibilities...
This being the era of AOL punters I created a neat VBA utility in a Word doc to that used netsend to spam other computers in the school. Shared the file widely.
Then I used the technique to explore the network... eventually was able to use net use to connect to a remote drive in the school administrator's office where I found a text file of every student birthday, home address, and SSN... which I then could use to sign into anyone's account (password was derivative of name and SSN).
Culminated with pwning a school rival by putting all his files in a password protected zip on the desktop and dropping a batch file in his startup folder that printed a text file with the password to the printer when he logged in.
I discovered that I could use VBA from Word to shell out to cmd bypassing all of the security. This opened a world of possibilities...
This being the era of AOL punters I created a neat VBA utility in a Word doc to that used netsend to spam other computers in the school. Shared the file widely.
Then I used the technique to explore the network... eventually was able to use net use to connect to a remote drive in the school administrator's office where I found a text file of every student birthday, home address, and SSN... which I then could use to sign into anyone's account (password was derivative of name and SSN).
Culminated with pwning a school rival by putting all his files in a password protected zip on the desktop and dropping a batch file in his startup folder that printed a text file with the password to the printer when he logged in.