Hacker History III: Professional Hardware Hacker

Following on from my C64 hacking days, but in parallel to my BBS Hacking, this final part looks at my early hardware hacking and creation of a new class of meteorological research radar...

Ever since that first C64 and through the x86 years, I’d been hacking away – mostly software; initially bypassing copy-protection, then game cracks and cheats, followed by security bypasses and basic exploit development.

Before bug bounty programs were invented in the 2010’s, as early as 1998 I used to say the best way to learn and practice hacking skills was to target porn sites. The “theory” being that they were constantly under attack, tended to have the best security (yes, even better than the banks) and, if you were ever caught, the probability of ever appearing in court and having to defend your actions in front of a jury was never going to happen - and the folks that ran and built the sites would be the first to tell you that.

In the mid-to-late 1980’s, following France’s 1985 bombing and sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand, if you wanted to learn to hack and not worry about repercussions – any system related to the French Government was within scope. It was in that period that war-dialing and exploit development really took off and, in my opinion, the professional hacker was born – at least in New Zealand it was. Through 1989-1991 I had the opportunity to apply those acquired skills in meaningful ways – but those tales are best not ever written down.

Digital Radar

Easily the most fun hardware hacking I’ve ever done or been involved with ended up being the basis for my post-graduate research and thesis. My mixed hardware hacking and industrial control experience set me up for an extraordinary project as part of my post graduate research and eventual Masters in Atmospheric Physics.

I was extremely lucky:

1. The first Mhz digitizer cards were only just hitting the market
2. PC buses finally had enough speed to handle Mhz digitizer cards
3. Mass storage devices (i.e. hard drives) were finally reaching an affordable capacity/price
4. My supervisor was the Dean of Physics and had oversight of all departments “unused budgets”
5. Digital radar had yet to be built

My initial mission was to build the world’s first digital high-resolution vertically pointing radar and to use it to prove or disprove the “Seeder-feeder mechanism of orographic rainfall”.

Taking a commercial analogue X-band marine radar and converting the 25 kilo-watt radar with a range of 50 miles and a resolution measured in tens-of meters, to a digital radar with an over-sampled resolution of 3.25 cm out to a range of 10km was the start of the challenge – but successfully delivered nevertheless. That first radar was mounted on the back of a 4x4 Toyota truck – which was great at getting to places no radar had been before. Pointing straight up was interesting – and served its purpose of capturing the Seeder-feeder mechanism in operation – but there was room for improvement.

Back at the (family) factory, flicking through pages of operation specification tables for electric motors (remember – pre-Internet/pre-Google) and harnessing the power of MS-DOS based AutoCAD, I spec'ed out and designed a mounting mechanism for making the radar scan the sky like a traditional meteorological radar – but one that could operate in winds of 80 mph winds, at high altitude, in the rain. Taking a leaf out of my father’s design book – it was massively over engineered ;-)

Home for many months - the mobile high resolution radar + attached caravan. Circa 1994.

This second radar was mounted to an old tow-able camper-van. It was funny because, while the radar would survive 80+ mph winds, a gust of 50+ mph would have simply blown over the camper-van (and probably down the side of a hill or over a cliff). Anyhow, that arrangement (and the hacks it took to get working) resulted in a few interesting scientific advances:

• Tracking bumblebees. Back in 1994, while GPS was a thing, it didn’t have very good coverage in the southern hemisphere and, due to US military control, it’s positioning resolution was very poor (due to Selective Availability). So, in order to work out a precise longitude and latitude of the radar system, it was back to ancient ways and tracking the sun. I had code that ran the radar in passive mode, scanned horizontally and vertically until it found that big microwave in the sky, and tracked its movements – and from there determine the radar’s physical location. (Un)fortunately, through a mistake in my programming and leaving the radar emitting it's 25kW load, I found it could sometimes lock-on and track bright blips near ground-level. Through some investigation and poor coding, I’d managed to build a radar tracking system for bumblebees (since bumblebees were proportional to the wavelength and over-sampled bin size – they were highly reflective and dominated the sun).
• Weather inside valleys. The portability of the camper-van and the high resolution of the radar also meant that for the first time ever it was possible to monitor and scientifically measure the weather phenomenon within complex mountain valley systems. Old long-range radar, with resolutions measured in thousands of cubic meters per pixel, had only observed weather events above the mountains. Now it was possible to digitally observe weather events below that, inside valleys and between mountains, at bumblebee resolution.
• Digital contrails. Another side-effect of the high resolution digital radar was its ability to measure water density of clouds even on sunny days. Sometimes those clouds were condensation trails from aircraft. So, with a little code modification, it became possible to identify contrails and follow their trails back to their root source in the sky – often a highly reflective aircraft – opening up new research paths into tracking stealth aircraft and cruise missiles.

It was a fascinating scientific and hacking experience. If you’ve ever stood in a doorway during a heavy rainfall event and watched a curtain of heavier rainfall weave its way slowly down the road and wondered at the physics and meteorology behind it, here was a system that digitally captured that event from a few meters above the ground, past the clouds, through the melting layer, and up to 10 km in the air – and helped reset and calibrate the mathematical models still used today for weather forecasting and global climate modeling.

By the end of 1994 it was time to wrap up my thesis, leave New Zealand, head off on my Great OE, and look for full-time employment in some kind of professional capacity.

A (much) later version of the High Resolution X-Band Radar.

When I look back at what led me to a career in Information Security, the 1980's hacking of protected C64 games, the pre-Internet evolution of BBS and it's culture of build collaboration, and the hardware hacking and construction of a technology that was game changing (for it's day) - they're the three things (and time periods) that remind me of how I grew the skills and developed the experience to tackle any number of subsequent Internet security problems - i.e. hack my way through them. I think of it as a unique mix. When I meet other hackers who's passions likewise began in the 1980's or early 1990's, it's clear that everyone has their own equally exciting and unique journey - which makes it all the more interesting.

I hope the tale of my journey inspires you to tell your own story and, for those much newer to the scene, proves that us older hands probably didn't really have a plan on how we got to where we are either :-)

This is PART THREE of THREE.

PART ONE (C64 Hacking)  and PART TWO (BBS Hacking) are available to read too.

--Gunter

Hacker History II: The BBS Years

Post-C64 Hacking (in Part 1 of Hacker History)... now on to Part 2: The BBS Years

Late 1986 (a few months before I started my first non-newspaper delivery and non-family-business job – working at a local supermarket) I launched my first bulletin board system (BBS). I can’t remember the software that I was running at the time, but it had a single 14k dial-up facility running on all the extra C64 equipment I’d been “gifted” by friends wanting faster/always access too my latest cheats and hacks.

The premise behind the BBS was two-fold: I wanted to learn something new (and hacking together a workable and reliable BBS system in the mid-80’s was a difficult enough challenge), and I saw it as a saving time distribution channel for my cheats/hacks; others could dial-in and download themselves, instead of me messing around with stacks of floppy discs etc.

At some point in 1986 I’d also saved enough money to by an IBM PC AT clone – a whopping 12Mhz 80286 PC, complete with Turbo button and a 10Mb hard drive. I remember specking out the PC with the manufacturer. They were stunned that a kid could afford their own PC AT and that he planned to keep it in his bedroom, and that he wanted an astounding 16k of video memory (“what do you need that for? Advanced ACAD?”)!

By 1989 the BBS had grown fairly large with a couple hundred regular members with several paying monthly subscription fees, but the stack of C64’s powering the BBS were showing their age and, in the meantime my main computing had moved down the PC path from 286, to 386, and to a brand-spanking new 486.

It was time to move on from C64 and go full-PC – both with the BBS and the hacks/cheats I was writing.

So in 1990, over the Summer/Christmas break from University I set about shifting the BBS over to a (single) PC – running Remote Access, with multiple dial-in lines (14.4k for regular users and 28.8k for subscribers).

The dropping of C64 and move to fully-fledged x86 PC resulted in a few memorable times for me:

• BBS’s are like pets. Owning and operating a BBS is a lot like looking after an oversized pet that eats everything in its path and has destructive leanings; they’re expensive and something is always going wrong. From the mid-80’s to mid-90’s (pre-“Internet”) having a BBS go down would be maddening to all subscribers. Those subscribers would be great friends when things were running, or act like ungrateful modern-day teenagers being denied “screen-time” if they couldn’t dial-in for more than a couple of days. Keeping a BBS running meant constant tinkering under the covers – learning the intricacies of PC hardware architecture, x86 assembly, live patching, memory management, downtime management, backup/recovery, and “customer management”. The heady “good-old days” of PC development.
• International Connectivity. With me in University and too-often referred to as the “student that knows more about computers than the campus IT team”, in 1991 I added Fidonet and Usenet support to my BBS. There had been a few BBS’s in New Zealand before mine to offer these newsgroups, but they were very limited (i.e. a small number of groups) because they were reliant upon  US dial-up for synching (which was damned expensive!). My solution was to use a spare modem in the pack of a University lab PC to connect semi-permanently to my BBS. From there my BBS used the Universities “Internet” undersea cable connectivity to download and synch all the newsgroups. Technically I guess you could call it my first “backdoor” hacking experience – which ended circa 1993 after being told to stop as (by some accounts) the BBS was peak consuming 1/3 of the entire countries academic bandwidth.
• First Security Disclosure. Setting up Remote Access (RA) was an ordeal. It was only a week later – Christmas Eve 1990 – that I publicly disclosed my first security vulnerability (with a self-developed patch); an authentication bypass to the system that controlled what games or zones a subscriber could access. I can’t remember how many bugs and vulnerabilities I found in RA, QEMM, MS-DOS, modem drivers, memory managers, and the games that ran on RA over those years. Most required some kind of assembly instruction patch to fix.
• Mailman and Sysop. Ever since those first BBS days in 1986, I’d felt that email (or Email, or E-Mail) would be the future for communications. The tools and skills needing for managing a reliable person-to-person or person-to-group communication system had to be built and learned – as too did the management of trust and the application of security. Some BBS operators loved being Sysops (System Operators – i.e. Admins) because they could indulge their voyeurism tendencies. I hated BBS’s and Sysops that operated that way and it became an early mission of mine to figure out ways of better protecting subscriber messages.

That fumbling about and experimenting with PC hardware, MS-DOS, and Windows at home and with the Bulletin Board System, coupled with learning new systems at University such as DEC Alpha, OpenVMS, Cray OS, and HP-UX in the course of my studies, and the things I had to piece-together and program at my parents factories (e.g. PLC’s,  ICS’s, RTU’s, etc.) all combined to add to a unique perspective on operating systems and hardware hacking.

By the time I’d finished and submitted my post-grad research thesis, it was time to tear down the BBS, sell all my computers and peripherals, and leave New Zealand for my Great OE (Overseas Experience) at the end of 1994.

This is PART TWO of THREE.

PART ONE (C64 Hacking) was posted yesterday and PART THREE (Radar Hacking) will be on Wednesday.

Hacker History I: Getting Started as a Hacker

Curiosity is a wonderful thing; and the key ingredient to making a hacker. All the best hackers I know are not only deeply curious creatures but have a driving desire to share the knowledge they uncover. That curiosity and sharing underpins much of the hacker culture today – and is pretty core to people like me and those I trust the most.

Today I continue to get a kick out of mentoring other hackers, (crossed-fingers) upcoming InfoSec stars and, in a slightly different format, providing “virtual CISO” support to a handful of professionals (through my Ablative Security company) that have been thrown headfirst into protecting large enterprise or local government networks.

One of the first questions I get asked as I’m mentoring, virtual CISO’ing, or grabbing beers with a new batch of hacker friends at some conference or other is “how did you get started in computers and hacking?”.

Where did it all start?

The early days of home computing were a mixed bag for me in New Zealand. Before ever having my own computer, a bunch of friends and I would ditch our BMX’s daily in the front yard of any friend that had a Commodore VIC20 or Amstrad CPC, throw a tape in the tape reader, and within 15 minutes be engrossed in a game – battling each other for the highest score. School days were often dominated by room full of BBC Micros – where one of the most memorable early programs I wrote was to use a sensitive microphone to capture the sounds of bugs eating. I can still remember plotting the dying scream of a stick insect as it succumbed to science!

Image via: WorthPoint

I remember well the first computer I actually owned – a brand-spanking new SpectraVideo SV-328 (complete with cassette tape reader) that Santa delivered for Christmas in 1983. I thought it was great, but quickly tired of it because there weren’t many games and all my friends were getting Commodore VIC-20 or Commodore 64 microcomputers – which had oh so many more games. So, come late 1984, I flogged my SpectraVideo and brought (second-hand) my first Commodore 64 (C64).

I can safely say that it was the C64 that lit my inner hacker spark. First off, the C64 had both a tape (then later diskette) capability and a games cartridge port. Secondly, New Zealand is a LONG way from where all the new games were being written and distributed from. Thirdly, as a (pre)teen, a single cartridge game represented 3+ months of pocket money and daily newspaper deliveries.

These three constraints resulted in the following:

• My first hardware hack. It was possible to solder a few wires and short-circuit the memory flushing and reboot process of the C64 via the games cartridge mechanism to construct a “reset” button. This meant that you could insert the game cartridge, load the game, hold-down your cobbled together reset button, remove the games cartridge, and use some C64 assembly language to manipulate the game (still in memory). From there you could add your own boot loader, save to tape or floppy, and create a back-up copy of the game.
• “Back-up Copies” and Community. C64 games, while plentiful, were damned expensive and took a long time to get to New Zealand. So a bunch of friends all with C64’s would pool our money every few weeks to buy the latest game from the UK or US; thereafter creating “back-ups” for each-other to hold on to – just in case the costly original ever broke. Obviously, those back-up copies needed to be regularly tested for integrity.  Anyhow, that was the basis of South Auckland’s community of C64 Hackers back in 1983-1985. A bunch of 10-14 year-olds sharing the latest C64 games.
• Copy-protection Bypassing. Unsurprisingly, our bunch of kiwi hackers weren’t the first or only people to create unauthorized back-ups of games. As floppies replaced tapes and physical cassettes as the preferred media for C64 games, the software vendors started their never-ending quest of adding copy-protection to protect unauthorized copying and back-ups. For me, this was when hacking become a passion. Here were companies of dozens, if not hundreds, of professional software developers trying to prevent us from backing-up the programs we had purchased. For years we learned, developed, and shared techniques to bypass the protections; creating new tools for backing-up, outright removal of onerous copy-protection, and shrinking bloated games to fit on single floppies.
• Games Hacking. At some point, you literally have too many games and the thrill of the chase changes. Instead of looking forward to playing the latest game for dozens of hours or days and iteratively working through campaigns, I found myself turning to hacking the games themselves. The challenge became partially reversing each game, constructing new cheats and bypasses, and wrapping them up in a cool loader for a backed-up copy of the game. Here you could gain infinite lives, ammo, gold, or whatever, and quickly step through the game – seeing all it had to offer and doing so within an hour.
• Hacking for Profit. Once some degree of reputation for bypassing copy-protection and creating reliable cheater apps got around, I found that my base of “friends” grew, and monetary transactions started to become more common. Like-minded souls wanted to buy hacks and tools to back-up their latest game, and others wanted to bypass difficult game levels or creatures. So, for $5-10 I’d sell the latest cheat I had.

At some point in 1986 I recognized that I had a bunch of C64 equipment – multiple floppy drives, a few modems, even a new Commodore 64C – and more than enough to start a BBS.

This is PART ONE of THREE. 

PART TWO (BBS Hacking) is up and PART THREE (Radar Hacking) on Wednesday.