ANSI Bomb

ANSI Bombs were one of the most common hax in the BBSes, they were used by trolls and by skids.

gay ansi art

What are they?

Batman??? In my BBS???

ANSI bombs usually change key mapping, delete stuff from computer or spam ANSI art on a BBS. They existed thanks to ANSI.SYS, which was a device driver in the DOS family of operating systems that provides extra console functions through ANSI escape sequences.

In ANSI everything is done with a system of escape codes, the code syntax is like this:

   ESC [13;27p

All the commands start with the word ESC (for the retards: it doesn't mean escape) followed by a "[", after it is where the code is placed. The previous would change the Enter key (13 in ANSI) to the Escape key (27 in ANSI), the "p" means that its the end of the command. You can find the full list of key codes here.

The same method can be used for massive text spamming, by changing the 27 to "LOLDONGS" for example, once you click Enter it would print LOLDONGS into the console. A more elaborate thing could be used to print gay coloured ANSI art. And also you can delete stuff from the computer by doing something like this:

   ESC [13;"Del *.*";13p

Examples

Please, help the duck

The following ANSI BOMB will make that once the user types Enter, the thing he submitted gets automatically deleted, which will make him to rewrite.

   ESC [13;2Kp

The ammount of lulz can increase dramatically if you swap Y/y and N/n keys, since they are the ones used in BBS for registering an account for example.

   ESC [78;89;13p ESC [110;121;13p

Butthurt can increase even more by autoreproducing the bomb with a batch script that copies itself to the root of the computer, so it will run every time you turn on the PC and will scare the shit out of the faggot user.

    ESC [13;27;13;"copy bomb.ans c:\";13;"copy con c:\autoexec.bat";13;"type bomb.ans";13;0;109;13;"cls";13p

The worm can be easily cleaned by going to the folder where it is and deleting it, but if you go back to the same BBS where you got it, it will come back.

See Also

• BBS
• ASCII
• Cult of the Dead Cow
• Gopher protocol
• Virus

Links and Sources

• ANSI.SYS article (Wikipedia)
• ANSI Bomb constructor
• Textfiles tutorial
• How to use ANSI.SYS

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