Ask HN: What's the coolest hacking story you've heard?

[napworth]

This is hackernews after all. Time for us to discuss more hacks.

[surprisetalk]

• "Stalking the Wily Hacker" is about Cliff Stoll, a physicist at UC Berkley who invented cybersecurity after noticing that a few cents were missing from the computer lab. This story is WILD.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h7rLHNXio8

• The "graphing calculator story" is about how a crazy dev snuck into Apple every day for a year to create the beloved plotting app for MacOS.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl643JFJWig

[tomcam]

I worked with Tim Paterson (guy who invented what became MS-DOS) at Microsoft. We were on the VB team. Once I came into his office while he was viewing a hex dump. He was reading generated code. He had memorized the x86 opcodes and it was just too slow for him to look at assembly output.

[astro19238_]

/thread

[rajangdavis]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

[nigamanth]

Firstly, hacking isn't "cool". Just imagine if you were the victim, it's a serious issue that is illegal in many parts of the world.

With that in mind, in my opinion, the Pegasus is quite "cool" (synonym for scary).

[rawgabbit]

Stuxnet. How Israel and the US used a virus to slow Iranian uranium enrichment.