_________     SWAT MAGAZINE ISSUE THIRTY NINE MARCH   __________ 
  /         \___________________________________________/          \
 /                          Scenenic wh0rez                         \
/                        By -=The Firestarter=-                      \
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Just another boring day at work, well, the days not
actually boring, i mean, i have a computer in frount of
me and i have a good bit of freedom with it, also
unless anything breaks down or i'm needed for something
then i can pretty much do what i'd like, well, within
reason. But i guess thats all irrelevent. 

In the background i have Grims Ping running, just sending
out 3 requests every 10 seconds looking for FTP servers
in Tiawan with dodgy permissions, once found these little
treasures will be probed and examined for there uses
in our warez trading, should they prove useful then they
will hold host to gigabytes of pirate software flying
all around for trade with other pirates, to share
amoungst fellow underground types, to use and abuse by
releasing them to the public via a network of websites.

All good stuff, within hours of getting our grubby hands
on the latest software, it can be around the globe and
being traded in dark alleyways in far flung countires.

But what am i on about? SWAT ain't a warez group, ok we
do on occation crack the odd program and blast it out
onto the internet, why? because we want to, because we
can, and because we've abused enough stuff out there to
atleast give something back.

Our days are spent devoted to this kind of work, spare
time used typing up files, coding away at some program
that will never see the light of day, researching for
programs that just *might* make it out, thinking up some
new "get-rich-quick" scheme involving the use and abuse
of "other peoples" accounts, hours and hours spent with
some 3rd party program scanning the internet looking
for FTP servers that can be "leeched" by us, NAT running
through lists and lists of IP addresses previously found
using WinGate Scanner on an all night "IP block scan" of
about 65,000 addresses, all being probed via some
Japaniese corporate webserver that hadn't been patched
against RDS or just had a weak password on there shared
drives.

New hosts get found, broken into, backdoored and 0wned.
What then? just turn them into drones against others
looking for more and more hosts to look at with our nodes
scanning long into the night looking for others.

FTP servers, located, tagged, and warez uploaded, FXP'ed,
traded, given away, and just left to rot. Sites are found,
looked at closely to see if they can be of any use other
than just dumping grounds for software. Can we just get FTP
access to 1 directory? or do we have more and more access
to what we shouldn't? can we write to the wwwroot directory?
if so, then perhaps we can have another node scanning the
internet for us.

But to what point? in all honesty what do we get out of
all this? we don't make thousands selling pirate software
on the streets, nor do we gain a lot from setting up
servers to scan other servers. We put hours of work into
programs and just give them away, we write an e-zine and
give it away for free.

Why? because we love it.

We do things and take what we can from them, we'll put
gigabytes of warez online and if we see the chance to make
a few quid from that, then we will, but in the end, more will
go out than ever comes in.

So to many people out there, you might think, "well its stupid,
who in there right mind puts all of that effort into something
to get nothing out of it", well, that may seem the case, but
its never like that, compatition, respect, power, you name it,
if we ever wanted to use everything that we do to get something
then we will. using and abusing the things we have, as either
weapons in some war, as tender in the underground economy, or
as a soapbox to stand on and shout about, anything at all.
Why? because we can.