this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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I have somehow found myself doing a lighthearted talk on retro hacking this Wednesday. Would anyone here happen to know anything about it?

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[โ€“] moody 39 points 3 days ago (1 children)

My ISP would give you like 10 MB to build a personal website. You'd log in to the FTP server, and it would take you to your personal directory. From there, you could "cd .." and end up in the parent directory and access everybody's data.

[โ€“] WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I wonder what the equivalent of this is today? Not meaning the same thing but what is incredibly insecure.

Probably cell phone interception and manipulation of cell service.

[โ€“] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 days ago

People. Social engineering is orders of magnitude easier than most default security configs.

That said, dumb security mistakes still happen regularly. Remember a few years ago when Missouri had a bunch of teachers' personal data just in the HTML sent to every person visiting their site? When a journalist notified them, the govt tried to say he was hacker.