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.

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.

In the late 1999+ you could sniff people’s passwords in clear text right out of the air on public WiFi networks. tcpdump port 110 and just watch them roll in.

In the late 90’s you could use a floppy disk to boot nt and dump the password hashes of anybody who had logged in, then run them through a dictionary attack which would take a matter of minutes before learning that your company’s top employees used their favorite football team or cartoon character as their password without even appending some numbers to it. Dude with the football password even had the password emblazoned in his office wall.

One time in the 90’s I got to a password prompt and just held enter, an eventually was just let past the password prompt.

In X windows if you managed to kill the screensaver password entry box you were dropped back to the desktop, and people found ways to crash the screensaver by overrunning the password input buffer by pasting input repeatedly using common keyboard shortcuts.

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.

Target sent credit card information to the back of the store unencrypted. Bluetooth didn’t need encryption because nobody can get that close. You could stop 50% of malware by changing the name of your windows directory. Security through obscurity was believed to work, every automated oil rig in the gulf was operating in the clear even into the 2000’s.

Wild times.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The connection between Cap’n Crunch, phone system hacking, and Apple is a pretty important part of early hacking history.

You could use telnet as example of a “historic vulnerability” in your talk.

[removed my post: someone else already mentioned Captain Crunch]

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

In the 90’s, companies were super lax on data security, retention, and destruction. In my city we had major IT players like INTEL, HP, Motorola, etc. We would dumpster dive and find whole computers full of data and no passwords. We were after the hardware so all our friends could play Doom MP, Quake, or later Unreal Tournament… so we usually wiped them but who knows what was in those things. It was a lot of e-waste and because of divers with bad intentions, now there’s incredibly strict corporate rules about data security/destruction.