As a kid l0pht was this mythical force, along with cDc. I would read a bunch of papers, not understanding any of it, but I thought it was so cool. I remember being very disappointed when the domain redirected to @stake.
great article but it kind of petered off at the end... why not highlight what folks have gone on to do post @stake?
they got acquired by Symantec. Mudge went on to work with the DoD to development a cyber fasttrack program, Weld started and recently sold Veracode, Katie started the bug bounty at Microsoft, Joe Grand is still doing his thing w/ HW etc...
these folks really are self-made titans of the industry and a true testament to meritocracy and the hacker ethos. They legitamized security research as we know it.
I’d like to also remember SpaceR0gue’s now gone HNNCast with great segments like “tool time” and “con fu”
Man, this whole series is so well written. I remember back in the day, when lophtcrack, Medusa, Cain and Abel, and JackTheRipper along with massive (for the time) rainbow tables were the tools of the trade (This was a little before internet exploits and Metasploit gained popularity). As a little script-kiddie, finding and running exploits on unsecured servers and machines, doing silly things like ARP poisoning in my high school lab network and bruteforcing zip files with passwords, oh such glorious times. I truly went from being a user of tech to a person with a hacker mindset, which has proved to be tremendously useful in my professional career.
I honestly feel that in the current day and age, if anyone tried the same stuff many of us got away with in the early 2000s (or 90s), then the punishment would be much much stricter. Not sure how that gets in the way of people learning by "banging things together till they work", which was a major source of learning for me.
Damn, I feel old now!