Where Dreams Begin
My first time hacking servers — to get free internet.
In 2004, I started high school.
I really didn’t want to. I wanted to start working right away. My skills were still limited, but I had plenty of time, energy, and curiosity. Yet in the world I grew up in, not going to school meant becoming a slacker, and for a family that valued education, that was simply not an option.
To make school easier, we moved closer to campus. The new apartment was already connected to the metropolitan area network, but our internet account had expired, so I was offline again. Fortunately, there was still an aging computer in the house, which meant I could keep writing code and playing offline games.
To get back online, I started looking into server hacking. There were many websites inside the metropolitan network that could be reached without dialing in, so if I could compromise one of them, I could use it as a proxy to access the wider internet.
Security practices among developers were so poor back then that on my first attempt, I managed to break into several sites using well-known tricks.
One site allowed files to be uploaded in almost any format. ASP files were blocked, but the developers had forgotten that extensions like .cer could still be executed by the server, so uploading a shell was easy. Another site accepted only image uploads, but preserved the original filename, so I used one ending in “.ASP\0.JPG”. During string handling, the real extension was discarded, leaving me with an ASP file.
Once I had a shell, I could browse files on the server and look for useful information — database passwords, login credentials, and even access to other servers. Before long, I had administrator privileges on several machines.
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I chose a few high-performance servers and enabled VPN services on them. From home, I used VPN instead of PPPoE to get online.
For a few months, it worked.
But during that time, I noticed that those servers were often unstable. After some investigation, I realized many of them were already infected with viruses. That made sense: if a beginner like me could break into them, plenty of others could too. The more I thought about it, the less comfortable I felt. Continuing to use them seemed risky — both in terms of privacy and legally.
So I began looking for another way to get free internet access.
Up to that point, my understanding of networking had more or less stopped at sockets. I didn’t really know how things worked underneath. So I found a book on the data link layer. After reading it, I finally understood concepts like hubs, switches, MAC addresses, and ARP.
I installed WinPcap so I could construct Ethernet frames myself and experiment with them. I also found a packet sniffer called Ethereal and used it to inspect the traffic.
I loved that name — Ethereal. It shared the same “Ether” as Ethernet. I had seen that word in books as a child: long ago, people believed electromagnetic waves traveled through the ether, even though that idea was later proven wrong.
I tried to register ethereal as a nickname, but it was already taken. So I changed it to EtherDream, because my dream of exploring the network was only beginning.
Ethereal was later renamed Wireshark, but I’ve kept the nickname ever since.
