Dial-Up Dreams: Unraveling Wardialing and Grade-Changing Hacks of the ‘90s

    I’m obsessed with dial-up networking and remote access, but digging into it is driving me up the wall. Think of Nicholas Adamsworth remotely hacking into the school grade system in 1993, and because the web is dead, it is hard to find information on this technology and to use this technology on modern computers because cEllPhoneS don’t have the bandwidth, and Windows removed features to prevent dial-in access yadayada yada. 

    Wardialing was like Shodan before Shodan was a thing. You’d hook a PC to a modem and run programs like ToneLoc or PhoneSweep to dial thousands of phone numbers, hunting for modems that answered with that screech. A hit could be a random PC, a corporate server, or even a school’s grade database. But what happened after the connection? How did the computer know what to do? And what software even exists today to try this? Spoiler: it’s grim. Spoiler, unfortunately, programs like this are not made today, with the only VoIP wardialer I could find being so stupid, non non-exe GitHub project, and PhoneSweep, which costs nearly 2000 dollars.

    However, like nearly every hacking article today, war dialing is explains as a ‘concept’ not how it was done in practice. I dug up an old PDF of Hacking Exposed  that spells it out: dial numbers, listen for modem tones, log the hits. But it skips what systems were waiting on the other end. You couldn’t just plug in a phone line and get a Windows shell—it wasn’t that easy.

    In the late ‘90s, some programs had built-in dial-up modes. Database tools like FileMaker Pro (versions 4–6, check the version 5 manual on the Internet Archive and Microsoft Access let you dial into a PC running the same software. With the client app installed, you could connect to a school’s grade database or a business’s inventory system over a modem. Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) were another beast—you’d use a terminal emulator like PuTTY or Tera Term (still kicking on modern Windows) to dial a number and navigate a text-based interface, maybe even pulling up grade files if the school ran a BBS.

Then there’s Windows XP’s Remote Access Service (RAS), which was a big deal back then. As I ranted on This Week In TheTechBoy Podcast, “Microsoft had this thing called… remote access service that worked over this in Windows XP… in Windows XP Pro” (37:44). RAS let someone dial into a PC over a phone line, and if set up, “it would ask for a username and a password give them access and you could browse shared folders run programs and even control desktop” with extra software installed (42:12). It was a core feature in XP Pro, less so in XP Home, which had me scratching my head about Microsoft’s logic: “why are you people adding security risks if… remote desktop is a security risk on Windows 10 and Pro but you’re not adding it on the home version” (41:35). RAS gave you network access—think shared folders or printers—but no graphical interface on its own. For full desktop control, like a hacker tweaking grades, you needed something like pcAnywhere. That software, paired with a client on another PC, let you take over the remote system via dial-up, making it a prime tool for sneaky grade-changing schemes.

Today, recreating this is tough. Windows 10 and 11 ditched RAS for modem dial-in, and cellphones can’t handle analog modem signals—digital networks just don’t play nice. Join me as I go on my hunt for wardialing. God Bless and Tech Talk To You Later!!