80s was all about the phones. And not much different than it is now.

If you want to know what hacking is like in the 80s watch Wargames and look up three dudes:

• Kevin Mitnick
• Mark Hess
• Katl Koch

If you want to know what hacking was like in the 90s watch Sneakers and look up

• Vladimir Levin
• Robert Tappan Morris

Lack of knowledge was the big problem before the internet. Late 80s, early 90s.

Take Phreaking.

Dialup BBSs (1200/75, 2400 or 9600 baud) were the primary source of dodgy files that I knew of. Some would have a secret area with various texts about hacking and quasi-illegal behaviour, including pornography of all flavours and of course the anarchists’ handbook. There were a few hacking and phreaking related stuff (getting free phone calls was huge then, given the cost of online activities - blackboxing, blueboxing, etc) and often required researching the types of PBX being used until you knew more than the people employed to run the things. To get access to this you’d need to suck up to the BBS owner, or prove your worth and “I’m not a law enforcement officer, honest” credits. Vouchsafing friends and others was another way, and there was cross-checking of you by sysops talking to each other.

The security on phone systems was laughable by modern standards, but at the time it was something very strongly guarded and if you found something, you made sure it stayed private. The phone companies helped by constantly denying anything was happening, but stakes were high. Legal consequences were high, but so were the rewards if you could get free calls.

Myself, I never did, but I always wanted to. Not having my monthly phone bills of hundreds of pounds would have been really nice…

When ADSL and always-on connections became available, phreaking stopped overnight.

According to the movies it’s 90 percent just saying “I’m in” then you’re in.

Of course not speaking for experience. I’ve personally never broken the law.

But often when companies listed their contact information they’d have a phone line and a fax number. If those numbers were near each other, you could pretty much guarantee that there would be a phone number somewhere in that sequence, or just past it, that would let you dial into their network, often weakly guarded with default password on common user names.

While it could take a little while, I’m aware of people collecting company phone numbers and war dialling overnight to find the network service number. Once you spoke to a modem it would give you a telnet connection and there was hardly ever any form of rate control. The worst I’ve hear about was getting chucked off after three attempts. But you could just dial up again.

I’ve heard of many, many company secrets being found that way.

Back in these days you’d install your distribution and stay there until the next major release. There were no online software repositiories for updates.

And exploits were plentiful. It was an easier time if you were up for mischief.

The temptation to say watch the documentary movie called Hackers but I can’t I good faith.

Money going online really changed the mood.

I recall a conference talk mentioning that the speaker (from a nordic country) told their friend to look at their online banking account, and then transferred them $-10. Either they were spotted or they disclosed it, I forget which, and luckily they were hired instead of jailed.

Was much easier as we all used password like 123456 or our first name.

It was exactly like the movie Hackers. 😅

Due to the nature of how the ARPAnet was born (lots of academic influence and the view of free sharing of information) outside the DOD infosec wasnt a thing, even then it was an after thought.

There was a healthy phone hacking community coming out of the 70s and into the 80s. Their techniques for getting free calls helped with exploiting the ARPAnet

There were pretty significant technology changes in the 90s with the WWW and the number of people and companies online leading to more opportunities and ways to exploit.

Wargames and Sneakers are pretty entertaining and while movies will give you a bit of a vibe.

If you can highly recommend you read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg_(book)

Really easy read and amazing true story

Do you mean programming? Not that much different from a few years ago tbh. Vibe coding may have changed stuff since then. Otherwise, there was less emphasis on online services, so the upgrade cycle was slower and you had to test more before shipping. That was, perhaps, a good thing in terms of software reliability.

Late 80s early 90s I got into the database for our menus & recipes and changed ‘hot dog’ to ‘tibe steak smothered in underwear’ and then promptly forgot about it until one day months later with the storeroom clerk he was printing the monthly menus and inventory, lol and behold I laughed my ass off. He never even noticed because we just printed and filed the paperwork.

I also point around in areas that were ‘resteicted’ I found the ‘star wars’ game, and I would play it for hours on the midnight shift. Nothing like the old green screen games.

Insert Willem Dafoe meme Im something of a hacker myself

Not really hacking, but in the 90s you could usually just connect to a mail server and it would believe what you told it.

If you were careful you could just type an email directly: MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, etc.

I would write scripts at work to send spoof emails sometimes, you could put anything as the FROM address, like “info @ catfacts” or whatever.

Another “not really hacking” example is that when some companies first got an Internet connection, they would just allocate public IP addresses to everyone, no gateway or firewall. So you could browse any non-passworded smb shares just knowing the IP.

A few things I remember.

Nobody sanitised their inputs.

You could get through logins by making a database query check whether 1 = 1 instead of a password. You could put JavaScript into guest book fields to redirect people to whatever crazy site you wanted.

My university lecturer told me about a well known supermarket that built a shop front. They made it in such a way that you could change the numbers before they were submitted and it wasn’t validated on the back end. So free food.

I recommend The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll as a good start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg_(book)

the phreaks will, they had tons of fun