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      Hacking ARPAnet -- Part II

                 by

             The SOURCE

                  of

       -=>*The Listening Post*<=-

              408-923-7575

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LEARNING WHO's WHO
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     As mentioned earlier, ARPANET can be made to disclose a great deal of
information before you have logged on or even hacked a password.  Among the most
useful commands are those that tell you who else is on the system and what the
status of the system is.  These files give you information that will help your
future hacking activities.  In this section we discuss commands that disclose
data about users that are available from the EXEC level.

@HELP WHOIS  <user entry>

NICNAME (alias WHOIS) is a utility for cross-net access of the NIC user
registration database.  NICNAME has been chosen as the global name for the
program, although many sites will choose to use the more familiar WHOIS name for
the program.

For the convenience of sites without user programs to interact with the NICNAME
server, WHOIS may be run on the SRI-NIC machine via Telnet service without
logging in.  The documentation below is slightly inaccurate in this case,
since there is no need to reach further through the net to access the database,
as the user program and the database are both on SRI-NIC.

The initial procedure is a one-reach, one-response query, which allows users at
any Internet site to obtain information about an organization or individual by
providing either a name or an IDENT.  The protocol used is a TCP protocol.  A
server program running at SRI-NIC takes the user's request, accesses the NIC
database and sends back the reply.

The reply can be in one of three forms:
     1)  Record for individual or organization found, information (including
         name, ident, organization, mailing address and network address) is
         returned to user.
     2)  Given name matches more than one record.  A short entry is returned for
         each matching record and the ueer is told to re-query the system using
         the ident to match any one iddividual or organization shown.
     3)  No record matched.  If an ident was given, this response means that the
         ident is free for use by an individual or organization, and can be
         obtained for such by contacting NIC.

     Examples of use follow.  For clarity, the user's typeing appears in
uppercase:

I.  Request for help information.

@WHOIS
Ident: ?
; Accessing NICNAME server at SRI-NIC...
    Please enter a name or a handle ("ident"), such as "Smith" or "SRI-NIC".
Starting with a period forces a name-only search; starting with exclamation
point forces handle-only.  Examples:
      Smith           [looks for name or handle SMITH]
      !SRI-NIC        [looks for handle SRI-NIC only]
      .Smith, John    [looks for name JOHN SMITH only]
    Adding "..." to the argument will match anything from that point, e.g.
"ZU..." will match ZUL, ZUM, etc.
    To search for all the authorized users of a host, use:
      %HOST
    To search for mailboxes, use one of these forms:
      Smith@          [looks for mailboxes with username SMITH]
      @Host           [looks for mailboxes on HOST]
      Smith@Host      [Looks for mailboxes with username SMITH on HOST]
    To have the ENTIRE membership list of a group or organization, if you are
asking about a group or org, shown with the record, use an asterisk character
"*" directly preceding the given argument.  [CAUTION: If there are a lot of
members this will take a long time!]
    You may of course use exclamation point and asterisk, or a period and
asterisk together.

II.  Search by name only.

@WHOIS .GRAY
; Accessing NICNAME server at SRI-NIC...

There are 9 matching entries.

Gray, Be