[diggum]

I was 16 or 17 and had a guest account on the local universities Ultrix server. I discovered that all of /dev/tty* was world-readable UNTIL someone had successfully signed in.

So a “cat /dev/tty* > passwords.txt” and waiting an hour collected the credentials of everyone logging in to the server.

At some point, I had logged into the account of one of the sysadmins who msgd me and let me know he’d changed his password and this would be my last time on his account. (If he only knew.). He offered me my own account if I told him who I was, and he might have meant it, but I didn’t bite. About a month later, a patch fixed the issue and that was that.

[emmelaich]

On Ultrix, /dev/mem and /dev/kmem were world readable.

Fun times!