Hacking QuickAid Internet Stations

by Durkeim the Withered God

There is nothing worse than waiting.

I hate waiting to get food, I hate waiting to take a piss, I hate waiting for my paycheck, and I definitely hate waiting in airports.  So there I was at 10 am, bored as hell, walking back and forth, until I discovered those mean looking Internet stations.

I've seen a lot of different Internet stations around the world, but none looked as mean as these (they're like cubicles but made out of steel).  Basically, in these stations you have a decent keyboard, a nice monitor, and an average interface.

These are the QuickAid Internet stations (www.QuickAid.com).  In this Internet station, similar to all the others, you swipe your credit card, and for three bucks you can search for extraterrestrial intelligence on the Internet for 10 minutes.  Oh well...

Finding the Operating System

This is always the best part of the entire process.

I tried a few things: Alt+F4, Alt+Esc, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+Alt+Del, invalid characters, and so on.

After overflowing the buffers by repeatedly pressing composite characters and special keys, I noticed the continuous Windows "ping" sound and the Windows desktop image in the background.  That along with the "nice" polished icons is a clear indication of the evil operating system.  As always, dumb developers chose Windows to program their applications.  Just because it's easier to program in Windows it doesn't mean it's safer or better.

What Can One Do Without Paying?

In the beginning the access is very limited.

We can only browse their web page using a stripped down version of Internet Explorer 4, send comments, and that's it.  This obviously means that the machine has a permanent connection to the Internet...  Good...

Since I am such an ethical guy, I decided to save the brute-force method (buffer overflow and keyboard/mouse crash) for a last resort.  I decided to stick with the basics.

So I started exploring the only gateway possible: their web page.  As I expected, all the hot keys were deactivated.  That meant no Ctrl+S and so on.

The next step was to look at every document on their site to find a missing link.  Before long I came across a ZIP'd file inside the site.  Wrong move!  As soon as I clicked the file, our good friend, the unregistered version of WinZip, came up.  The machine was now mine.

Obviously the next step was to add a file to the ZIP files.

I suggest that you add: C:\WINNT\System32\WINFILE.EXE

(You all probably remember this as being the 3.1 version of Windows Explorer.)

Then, just execute it after adding it.  And voilà.  The system is now yours.

You can edit the Windows Registry, change the settings, get the hot keys enabled again, navigate freely on the Internet, and, most important of all, you can disable that silly CyberPatrol (unethical).

Browsing the Web

Using WINFILE.EXE, execute C:\ATcom\install\ATbrowser.exe and there you go.  The rest is up to you.  If you want you can even start a FTP server in their machines!

I'm submitting this article just to prove that Windows-based programming is wrong, bad, barbaric, buggy, morally wrong, and slow.

Stop being lazy and program everything from scratch on a decent platform.  You're not going to rediscover the wheel, but you'll have perfect control over everything!

Control, my friends... it's all about control.