My first "hacking" success was with an ad-supported ISP called NetZero. The app logged you on to the web and had a persistent ad-banner on the screen. If you opened a full-screen app - in my case Starcraft - it would kick you off the internet.
However, I discovered that if you killed the NetZero application at just the right time (after connecting to the network but before the ad banner was initialized), you could stay online with no ad-banner and pwn some Zerg.
Even better was that if you looked at the logs it would show the hidden credentials for dialing in. You could copy those and create your own dial up connection without using the app at all
Even better even better: the password encoding scheme was rot13 prefixed with a zero and postfixed with a one. I made a keygen for it. Completely forgot about it until this very moment!
haha, finally I hear someone else did this. yes exactly, I enabled logging of the PPP connection and pulled the creds, I remember feeling like I could do anything after discovering this.....the good days!
I used NetZero for a summer by setting up a dumb dialer machine that shared its network connection to the rest of the house. The dumb dialer autoconnected to NetZero when outbound traffic was detected and since there was no monitor plugged in no one ever saw the ads. Was a pretty simple solution for a couple broke college guys.
There was a related service around this time that basically paid you to use the internet. But they only paid you if you were actively running their banner ads. Of course, this was rife for abuse through scripts that faked your activity. I ended up writing some of my own before they went bankrupt.
However, I discovered that if you killed the NetZero application at just the right time (after connecting to the network but before the ad banner was initialized), you could stay online with no ad-banner and pwn some Zerg.