It's hard to remember the details but i'll do my best...
It was back in my teen days and Yahoo! chatrooms were the big thing back then but where there is fun there is also mischief. I remember meeting virtual friends and engaging in casual chit-chat, discussing how our day was going and getting to know people.
On occasion an unusual username would join the room and users would begin to drop out. One day it was me who had been targeted and i quickly realised what was happening. A PING PING PING of mass messages would flood my desktop until my RAM would give-in and Y!Messenger would crash. While this being obviously frustrating i also found myself impressed and curious. I began researching what this was and how it worked. It wasn't long before i found forums about the dark side of the chat world. After a little more digging i found what out what these tools were and more importantly what i would need to create such tools.
I was lucky enough to have a friend working as a programmer and he introduced me to Microsoft's Visual Basic 6 and gave me a crash course in the fundamentals. From that day i was fixated on coding.
After months of practicing this code-thing and studying from examples i began creating simple programs that shown the time and date, play sounds on buttons, display lists and create forms. This quickly snowballed into loading text files, using kewlbuttonz.ocx to make my GUI look more fun, winsock.ocx with YMSG15.dll to connect to Yahoo! servers (i never quite continued down the C++ path to understand how .dll files worked). I spent hours using packet sniffer software to understand how data was passed between client and server, understand how packet strings were built and what was needed to replicate these actions successfully. Once i'd fathomed what was essential i was able to manipulate strings to act differently so i could achieve the result i wanted.
Soon after, many tests had lead to me creating a working booter program of my own. I was young, playful and yes, i'd become one of them mischievous individuals. The difference being my aim would be to protect my chat room (and later others) and the username "se7en" was to become synonymous in our little area of the Yahoo! world. Unknowingly i had created a booter like no other, a program that didn't flood memory by sending mass private messages. Until this post i haven't shared my method but my infamy is now long forgotten.
When sending a packet from one client to another you had to include the header which is the string type. Through sniffing packets i realised that even if you're not notified of an incoming packet it doesn't mean it hasn't been received. I sent just 2 packets through. The first being an outgoing webcam start which, from the receiving end would appear to do nothing but it would open a separate port. The second packet would use this port to send an abstract flood packet type, not recognised and would exceed the maximum packet size. The result would simply logout the client messenger immediately without effort.
So, that's it, that's the secret. Simple when you know how i guess.
Over the next 6-12 months i expanded my knowledge of Y! and what else i could build. "Booting" became a nuisance for many and so third-party tools like Y!Tunnel and chat room clients like Yah! and YahEh grew in popularity but vulnerabilities were found using similar methods of packet manipulation. I was surprised this hadn't been noticed and resolved. At this point i had built associations with other programmers. Within a few weeks, remember we were kids and had a lot of time on our hands, we collaborated to build a lightweight client which we could supply to others and offer a safer experience. It would be regularly updated to prevent new booting techniques and who better to prevent booting than the people that make the most popular booters!
To be more productive with my time i had been taking web coding classes funded by my local council. Thanks to 2 tutors, the infamous Macromedia Suite and an understanding of how code is written i'd learnt how to build website using HTML and CSS. Practice makes permanent so i created a website of my own and hosted it on a free web server - which was very popular at the time. I began building templates and sharing them between my communities and while they wasn't quite as popular as i'd hoped i did learn a lot along the way.
At this point there were factions and alliances between programming groups and websites, my own site included. Looking back, it was nothing special but it was something i'd designed and produced myself, i was incredibly proud. Feeling the need to further progress i had looked into what i could program next. Being mixed-up in the seedy communities i'd looked into the illegal side of things ie trojan software and hacking.
Until now my friends had found my ventures 'cool and funny' but this was going too far. I was now at the age where sitting at home in-front of a monitor all day was not going to be enough to support myself (although that's what i do now but whatever..) and i was mixing with a different group of peers. I had different opportunities now, new circles and thankfully this took my focus away from what could have been a questionable future. This is how this part of my life concludes. Messengers weren't so popular anymore and i had something new and shiny to quench my interest (find out more from the next blog post).
Some files were found on an old drive so they may not have looked then as they do now. I haven't included images of my flagship program 'ABC++' for reasons i cannot disclose.
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