YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Major ICQ security hole (1998)

113 points sysoleg 4 days ago 67 comments

SillyUsername 4 days ago | parent

So this is how my low numbered account was stolen back in the day - thanks for sharing.

rashkov 1 day ago | parent

Can’t believe I still remember my ICQ id

gersonazgo 1 day ago | parent

I read your comment and realized I also do haha lol lfmao rofl

giantrobot 1 day ago | parent

Mine is seared into my brain. It's also cheating a bit because it's only six digits.

wafflebot 1 day ago | parent

I was gonna drag you for making such a silly flex then I realized I'm just jealous because mine was eight

hdgvhicv 1 day ago | parent

Mine was 7 but I had it fur 5 years.

I also remember my compuserve id which lasted a mere 6 months over 30 years ago, And that was 10 digits.

stingraycharles 1 day ago | parent

Same like my Geocities homepage, never forget.

I feel like it's the same with your first phone number back when there were only landlines, etc. Some numbers are hard-wired.

aussieguy1234 1 day ago | parent

If it happened to me, my next move would be to steal it back

orbital-decay 1 day ago | parent

My UIN was merely 7-digit and when it got hacked the guy just logged in, chatted with my friends about random things, and left. I only found out because they were puzzled by "me" talking weird.

netsharc 1 day ago | parent

I wonder whether the password change mechanism asked for the old password... or if the same flaw existed.

"What's your old password?"

"something_more_than_8_characters_long"

"Let me check. The result of the check is... ERROR. Great, what's your new password?"

taspeotis 1 day ago | parent

Rewrite it in Rust

Teknomadix 1 day ago | parent

Ask an agent to rewrite it in Rust. #ftfy

jghn 1 day ago | parent

It'd be blazingly fast!

mannycalavera42 1 day ago | parent

Tooooooooooooooooooooooooot! (startup jingle, good mems)

keyle 1 day ago | parent

KeeeKooo!

compass_copium 1 day ago | parent

>When a password of 9 or more characters is sent, their buffer is over-run, and it allows you to log in.

Man, computers used to be fun

mingus88 1 day ago | parent

It really was a fun time. I remember sitting in a coffee shop just sniffing WiFi traffic.

A friend was a reporter for the local paper and interviewed the mayor. I turned my laptop around and showed my friend the mayors imap password. Just right there floating through the air.

moray 1 day ago | parent

I had to do the same at a friend's house once because he forgot his email password that was still saved in the browser!

And what about "borrowing" internet access by using a WiFi connection that used WEP? Learning the process and getting the first password was so satisfying...

frmrtntn 1 day ago | parent

In the early 2000s a lot of people rolled with no encryption at all! In high school I'd drive around the nearby neighborhoods at lunch until I found an open wifi network so I could browse the net. Never took long to find one.

mingus88 21 hours ago | parent

If vendors didn’t make it a default setting that would still be the case today

I remember when SunOS shipped enterprise servers with pretty much every service enabled. And the patching process was so cumbersome and risky many admins never bothered applying the recommended patch clusters

So much to explore and poke at!

saadn92 1 day ago | parent

Yep, now everything is done through agents unfortunately.

nubinetwork 1 day ago | parent

Unix crypt only accepted 8 characters and ignored the rest. If your password was 123456789, it was considered the same as 12345678a.

a_bonobo 1 day ago | parent

For local LAN play, Half-Life checked the CD key only for length I believe? It would happily accept 1234-56789-0123

jrpelkonen 1 day ago | parent

Indeed, this comment reminded me of this story: https://max.levch.in/post/724289457144070144/shamir-secret-s...

t_mahmood 22 hours ago | parent

Now I'll always have the nagging question about the recycle bin with engineer in it.

masternight 1 day ago | parent

I remember when ICQ used to give you the other persons IP address.

Then you could use that to winnuke them.

bestham 1 day ago | parent

Or run NetBus :-D

NexRebular 1 day ago | parent

Just to end up connecting to NetBuster.

yyaakkqq 1 day ago | parent

today you can use a WhatsApp call. or meet/teams/zoom...

wafflebot 1 day ago | parent

Lucky for me, my ICQ password was only 8 characters. And I used it on every website!

(To this day I can recall my ICQ number faster than my childhood phone number or my social security number.)

wildpeaks 1 day ago | parent

I often half-joke that my ICQ number is the last thing I'll forget if I get Alzheimer, long after my own name.

jghn 1 day ago | parent

Mine is still burned into my brain but I managed to get locked out a couple of decades ago so can't even do a nostalgia login.

jghn 1 day ago | parent

8? That was fancy. Mine was 7, all lower case characters, and I also used it on every website!

reinvantveer 1 day ago | parent

This made me almost spit out my coffee in laughter. This just made my day, hahaha

sshagent 1 day ago | parent

I seem to vaguely recall some buffer overflow for Sun Solaris, which was fun to login with. I do wonder what fun AI would have had crawling through these old code bases to find the crazy exploits available back then

shakna 1 day ago | parent

They still are. [0]

> This could lead to remote code execution over Bluetooth with no additional execution privileges needed.

[0] https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2020-0022

broeng 1 day ago | parent

BCrypt also comes to mind, as a more recent example ...

chuckhend 1 day ago | parent

Uh oh!

tehlike 1 day ago | parent

Incoming file transfer

stavros 1 day ago | parent

Oh god this instantly took me back to my the way teenage years' room felt and smelled.

scun 1 day ago | parent

like hamsters

pavel_lishin 1 day ago | parent

There are some point of sales systems that use the same sound effect, and every time it's like I'm teleported back to the 90s, sitting in my room with a pepsi, browsing the web and chattin' with friends.

notpushkin 1 day ago | parent

I only recall this beibeing used by McDonald’s in Russia, which seems to check out (no pun intended) considering your username :-)

pavel_lishin 19 hours ago | parent

Hah! I haven't been to a Russian McDonald's in ... certainly over a decade, maybe longer.

waltbosz 1 day ago | parent

AOL Instant Messenger had several remote code execution exploits. They worked just by sending an IM to someone. You could also crash their computer remotely, or maybe it would just create their client.

Also their stored password encryption algorithm was easily reversible.

camcil 1 day ago | parent

The AIM days are one for the books. What a time to be alive and interested in computerin'

jonhohle 1 day ago | parent

Wasn’t that how audio avatars worked (not by crashing, but ACr)? What a time to be alive.

waltbosz 1 day ago | parent

Don't know how they worked, but what you did to create one was rename a .wav to a .jpg .gif .bmp .etc

Hydraulix989 1 day ago | parent

AIM's built-in HTML parser had a bunch of super-linear parser complexity bugs, leading to people building "punters".

egeozcan 1 day ago | parent

This made me realize that I still remember my ICQ UIN! I cannot remember what I've had for lunch yesterday, btw.

Gareth321 1 day ago | parent

Mine began with a 2. Just saying.

ButlerianJihad 1 day ago | parent

That matters not at all, unless you reveal how many digits it is. Why isn’t anyone in this thread willing to reveal theirs? Just brag about it?

Mine also began with a 2. It was 279866. My girlfriend’s was slightly lower, as she introduced me to the new service. We both felt like pioneers in those halcyon days.

Mine was quickly usurped by a Russian hacker. The profile was replaced by Cyrillic writing. I never knew how they did it. None of my other accounts or socials have ever been usurped like that!

vaylian 1 day ago | parent

More importantly: Are you and your girlfriend still in contact with each other today?

darkwater 1 day ago | parent

In my case because I use it as a random seed or parts of it as PIN, cause I will never forget it and it's "secret" enough.

thomc 1 day ago | parent

I remember a lot of low number ICQ accounts being taken over back in the day, including my own and several security-minded friends. Because of how prevalent it was and how it was the only account we'd had compromised we assumed they found a flaw or had access to reset passwords, or could social engineer support etc.

It's good to finally know there was a critical flaw like the one in OP that was likely used.

FroshKiller 1 day ago | parent

Mine was 8966646, which is cool because it has 666 in it.

jghn 1 day ago | parent

Mine was in the 3.5 million range. My roommate at the time had a 6 digit number and didn't sign up that much before me, I remember it felt wild that they had grown so quickly. And then not long after that it was all 8 digit numbers.

And also yes, the last time I looked, my account was all cyrillic.

pwarner 20 hours ago | parent

2726304

I forgot my ATM PIN though.

berofeev 17 hours ago | parent

71191733

myth_drannon 1 day ago | parent

I think I discovered that by mistake using Miranda client in 2002!

The tech scene of the 90s in Israel was crazy. Mirablis was hiring high school students to do QA.

urvader 1 day ago | parent

> Mirabilis / AOL really needs to fix this problem.

runep 1 day ago | parent

ICQ sent messages directly between peers when both were online and unfirewalled and there were no verification that you were who you claimed. I had a lot of (friendly) fun spoofing other ICQ numbers. Or sending someone a message from themselves.

SG- 1 day ago | parent

i still remember my ICQ number all these years later.

SXX 1 day ago | parent

CVE-2012-2122: A Tragically Comedic Security Flaw in MySQL

https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2012/06/11/cve-2012-2122-a-...

> ... Since the authentication protocol generates a different hash each time this comparison is done, there is a 1 in 256 chance that ANY password would be accepted for authentication. ...

PedroBatista 1 day ago | parent

AI is really a dangerous technology, look how fast it’s discovering major security flaws!

Subdivide8452 1 day ago | parent

Am I correctly understanding that ICQ had an 8 character limit on the passwords?

Graziano_M 14 hours ago | parent

So this is a buffer overflow on the server side! Could probably have been used for RCE on their infrastructure. No NX, no ASLR, etc. of course it would be difficult to work it blindly without the binary or some sort of info leak.