Tale of a Clueless Hacker

A story is going around about a clueless hacker who gets mad with a chat-room moderator and tries to take revenge. He asks the moderator what his IP address is. The moderator tells him it's 127.0.0.1. The hacker apparently doesn't realize this number is geek-speak for home. It's the IP address of whatever computer you're currently using. Try to connect to it and you'll simply connect to your own computer. So the hacker plugs 127.0.0.1 into his hack-tool and then begins to gloat as he sees the hard-drive of the computer he's connected to disappear. He doesn't realize that he's erasing his own computer:

"I can see your E: drive disappearing, he gloated, "D: is down 45 percent!" he cried, before disappearing into the ether."

Hard to say if the story is true or not. The original version of it is in German. Slashdot has a lot of discussion about it.

Technology

Posted on Wed Apr 27, 2005



Comments

Old joke.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010523
Posted by Splarka  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  04:14 AM
I'm not super-geeky as geeks go. But even I recognized that address when I saw it. I find it hard to believe that anybody with the brains to hack somebody else's system wouldn't. Besides the obvious question of, why did he ask for the mod's IP address, and did he actually expect they'd give it to him?
Posted by PlantPerson  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  05:07 AM
A 'hacker' hacking Localhost (127.0.0.1) ?! Yeah right.
Posted by Ed  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  05:10 AM
...If he were screwing up his own computer, how could he still be operating it? This is a hoax.
Posted by Maegan  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  08:00 AM
I remember I used to go into Star Wars chat rooms on AOL & tell them that if they hit Alt S+S, they could see a new trailer clip (this was about the same time the Episode 1 was coming out).
Posted by Maegan  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  08:01 AM
Sounds fake to me, unless somebody can find a program out there that takes an IP address as input and reports percentages gone as the hard drives are erased.
Posted by Tom  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  08:49 AM
hehee. looks like this could touch off another internet meme like "all your base are belong to us". there's already a cafepress line
(http://www.cafepress.com/hackyou)
where you can get 'shut up i hack you' and 'my grandma surfs with fire wall' mugs and boxer shorts.
Posted by UsuallyDark  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  06:02 PM
He must be a great hacker. He managed to erase his own CD-ROM
Posted by Saint Cad  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  09:50 PM
Well, maybe he had a CD-RW.

And this is a fun shirt:


And I've seen "127.0.0.1 sweet 127.0.0.1" (But I want one that says "127.0.0.1 C12H22O11 127.0.0.1")
Posted by Splarka  on  Thu Apr 28, 2005  at  10:56 PM
I need to learn how to do that!!!
Posted by X  on  Fri Apr 29, 2005  at  07:23 AM
Well, I read through the whole thing. If it's a true story, that sure is some brainless hacker. Looks like he doesn't even know what a "ping timeout" is (I'm a moderator for a IRC chat room - we see that often, especially since our room is hosted on a very sad network that netsplits at least twice a day).
Posted by RAMChYLD  on  Fri Apr 29, 2005  at  12:00 PM
>>>I find it hard to believe that anybody with the brains to hack somebody else's system wouldn't. <<<

Exactly. Also, no hacker worthy of being called a hacker would be powerless to affect you unless you politely provided him with your IP address. You don't really find it that hard to believe that some assclown on the Internet would be that stupid, do you? Just because you found a hack tool somewhere doesn't mean you aren't a dumbass.

"I'm a master thief! I can break into anywhere! If you don't believe me then just give me your keys and see what happens, ass!"

The thing I find unbelievable is that, if you read the whole story, it took the guy like three tries to erase his own harddrive. Why? Was he losing the net connection to his own computer?
Posted by Barghest  on  Fri Apr 29, 2005  at  07:10 PM
-> it took the guy like three tries to erase his own harddrive <-

From how I read it, he was trying different hack tools, starting with a simple crash (hence the ping timeouts), and moving up to a deletion virus. It still sounds like BS to me though.
Posted by Splarka  on  Fri Apr 29, 2005  at  09:13 PM
When people ask newb-questions on IRC and such, it's fun to tell them, "just push Alt-F4" and watch them spontaneously log out :lol:
Posted by Lgab  on  Sat Apr 30, 2005  at  09:38 AM
funny thing! you can't just erase your hardisk at the same time working on it.
Posted by nobid  on  Thu May 12, 2005  at  05:47 PM
Of course, if he had multiple hard drives, he can quite happily erase them - but when he reaches the drive with his OS on it, he will encounter problems - either denied access (since his OS is still using those processes) or his system will crash.
Posted by Arkanix  on  Sun Dec 18, 2005  at  03:39 PM
k for one ya no doubt there is no idoit on the face of this planet that dont know if he's hacking him self i call bull shit on this story it's bunk junk i my self have been on the computer since i was 9 years of age am i a hacker? i wouldnt know if i did i wouldnt tell ya ive found all kinda hacks and ip sniffers out there im sure if i keep looking il find a hack that deletes hard drives and shows me precentages lol.. alright had enough fun im gonna hack this site now bye bye hahahahahahahahaha gime a break






1337 xxN
Posted by lotuS-DoG  on  Thu Dec 29, 2005  at  10:17 PM
Alright, you're all pretty short-minded from what I can tell... I'm not saying this is real or a hoax, but none of you seem to be smart enough to have payed much attention to what was posted...

First off, he claimed E, then D drives were disappearing... Well, neither drive is required for (normal/standard/99% of installation's) to operate.

Second... Yes, you'd be surprised at the amount of noobs that will blindly ask for your IP. I've seen countless noobs do this in games, so... Just because it's a newb thing to do... doesn't mean it's impossible and definately isn't grounds to call this a hoax... Remember, the whole post was making fun of a "newb" for what he did.

It's fake because he said D drive is 45% gone? Have any of you used format.com once in your life? It displays a percentage until completion, and if you corrolate this with the drives disappearing.... I'm assuming he was using good ol fashioned format.com... and since... D and E aren't system drives in 99% of Windows installs, windows won't refuse your request...

Anyways, it was very painful to read all of your responses that "proved" it was a hoax. It still may be a hoax, but come on people use your brains!
Posted by phire  on  Sat May 13, 2006  at  03:30 AM
I am not a geek but i know 127.0.0.1 is a home ip..and how can he/she say that drive E and D are deleted or in the process of deleting unless he has a cd/dvd in them because windows will not delete drives E and D anyway. It may format them or erase the cd or dvd but it won't delete the drives..even formatting your C drive if its in use is almost impossible so if the hacker is a noob how would he know how to delete the C,D or E drives even with a hack tool???
how many noobs can find let alone use a hack tool?

right i'm off to hack your granny lmao 😉
Posted by Adam Zapple  on  Thu Jul 20, 2006  at  04:09 PM
C'mon, D and E drives don't HAVE to be CD/DVD room, you can put whatever letter you like on a harddrive, exept from mabye A, B and C, I'm not sure though..
but i find that story hard to belive anyways, but that's my opinion and i'm not saying it isn't true, i've crashed into alot of "noobs" in my life, which haven't been too long, yet...
Posted by Lay  on  Mon Oct 30, 2006  at  05:40 AM
Alright, you're all pretty short-minded from what I can tell... I'm not saying this is real or a hoax, but none of you seem to be smart enough to have payed much attention to what was posted
Posted by Computer To All  on  Fri Jul 24, 2009  at  06:01 PM
?Anyone who claims to be an
Posted by hacker  on  Sun Feb 07, 2010  at  09:14 AM
Yeah, it's a hoax.

There's not any real way to just delete someone's hard drive(s) by knowing their IP address. And if someone had such a program, they'd know how to get someone's IP address. If it were that easy then hackers wouldn't have to resort to trojan horses and phishing schemes. They'd just copy your hard drive after getting peoples' IP addresses.

Since the early days of the Net, everyone's been running something called NAT which prevents this very thing. There are a NUMBER of details the story leaves out - file permissions, for one.

So yeah, it's a hoax. Incidentally, why would a program that does this erase the system hard drive LAST? Wouldn't you do that first?
Posted by Tensigh  on  Thu Mar 04, 2010  at  08:42 PM
This thread is old I know, but why is it hard to delete your own hard drive? The deletion software, if loaded completely into memory, should continue to run just fine until it deletes some part of the OS also being used by the deletion utility but not already loaded into memory. Am I wrong?
Posted by eatthepuck  on  Fri Mar 19, 2010  at  12:58 PM
@eatthepuck

It depends on the OS. With Windows, a lot of the OS files that are loaded into memory can't be deleted. It's both a helpful (and annoying) feature. Open a document in Word then try to delete the file. You'll get a message that it can't do it since it's being used, but close Word then try it again and it will work.

In Linux, though, you CAN do this. But anybody using Linux would know that 127.0.0.1 is their home address.

Again, there isn't ANY kind of tool that can delete hard drives just by knowing an IP address. It doesn't exist otherwise this would happen all the time. But it does make for a funny story.
Posted by Tensigh  on  Fri Mar 19, 2010  at  03:35 PM
If this is true then this is probably a script kiddie and not a real hacker. I think that most hacker will recognise that IP.

But this is probably a hoax.
Posted by 28  on  Wed Sep 15, 2010  at  10:00 AM
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