Tips Hacking – A Basic UNIX Overview

 UNIX FOR DOS ADDICTED WaReZ PuPPieZ AND THEIR PETS

One of the most common operating systems in existance is Unix. Unix  exists in many different flavors, from Berkeley BSD to AT&T System V to SunOs. Basic working knowledge of Unix is almost essential to a hacker, as it is the system a hacker is most likely to come across.

If you intend to use the internet at all, or to do any serious exploration of Telenet, the ability to navigate through Unix is a necessity. (Unix is also the single most interesting system in

existance: it’s just fun to fuck with).

 Unix Logins

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  Most Unix logins look essentially the same. A general Unix login

  prompt looks something like this connected to five.finger.com

  login:

 That first line is the system identifier. Although it’s not at all essential to what you are doing, it’s good to know what system you are attempting to log on to. The second line is what typically identifies the system you are on as Unix. Almost all Unix systems greet a user with the same prompt:

  login:.

  Well, there’s not much to do in Unix from the outside, and Unix systems are typically fairly secure at this point. You may be able to obtain a list of users, or current users, by logging in as ‘who’, but other than that there are few functions available here. Unless you are on the internet, or have accounts specifically for the specific machine you are on, the only way on to the system is to try the default passwords. What are the default passwords?

Unix systems come installed with certain passwords automatically. In addition, some accounts must exist on a system. One such account is ‘root’. This user is the divine Kami of the Unix system… in short, an all access pass. Unfortunately, few systems allow root logins remotely, and even fewer leave ‘root’ unpassworded. Nevertheless, it’s always worth a shot… try this:

connected to ren.stimpy.net

login: root

password: root

invalid login

login:

well, nice try anyways… other possible passwords for root include ‘sysadmin’, ‘sys’, ‘admin’… you get the idea. You may also want to try these passwords with a single digit appended (added, idiot) to them… meaning the password ‘root’ could be ‘root1′ or ‘root2′.

An interesting tip about passwords in general… many people that use passwords under 8 characters tend to add a digit or a non-alphanumeric character to the password. This is done in order to hinder guessing, and to stop password breakers (more on this later). In this case, you may want to try adding a space before root… or even an ascii 255 to the end.

Fortunately, there is more than one default password in a unix system… a quick list:

  sys                         sys

  bin                        bin

  daemon               daemon

  rje                         rje

  setup                   setup

  uucp                    uucp/nuucp/anonymous

  nuucp                  uucp/nuucp/anonymous

  mountfsys           mountfsys

  In the System

  ————-

Ok, at this point, I’m going to assume you’ve gotten past the login… as painful as that may sound. Although Unix may be secure from the outside, without effort from the system administrators, the inside of the system is not.

First off, you’ll likely by asked for a terminal. vt100 serves your purposes sufficently, and it’s typically the default, so hit enter. Now, hopefully, you have a prompt. There are many different types of unix prompts, some of which contain current directory information, some of which are just a single character. Just don’t panic when my examples don’t look exactly like what you’ve got on your screen.

The first thing you *need* to do on the system is establish your tty paramters. As eldritch and arcane sounding as this term may seem, it’s actually quite simple… you need to tell the system what keys are going to do what.

To study this further please download A Basic UNIX Overview