Synopsis

Basic Communications Limited was a small ISP serving western Illinois from 1994-1997 when it was absorbed by AccessUS and then Anet.

Like most 4000 subscriber ISP’s of it’s time it specialized in giving exotic second hand UNIX workstations new life as servers and mesmerizing displays of blinkly lights from racks of 28.8 USR Sportster modems. A rainbow of NeXT, SunOS, HPUX, IRIX, and Linux brought a world of possibility to our community and especially a select few of the youth in town who spent equal parts hacking root and accidentally crashing mail servers by emailing each other Warcraft 2 disk sets.

This talk will appeal to the kid (hacker kid) in all of us, as well as old school UNIX cats who will probably spend the rest of the con giving us the network map of their high-school ISPs. We’ll cover a wide array of hacks and antics inflicted by us and our cohorts, as well as try and capture the elegance of early ISP’s that better resemble model trains than today’s enterprise networks.

Bio

kevN has been building and breaking information systems for almost 20 years. He is currently leading the security assessment group at US Bank. He’s held principal roles in security consulting firms, led architecture and engineering groups for large dot-coms, and built ISPs.

Dop is infrastructure assessment lead for US Bank. He specializes in systems security engineering, traffic analysis, infrastructure penetration testing, and making sense.