This happened a lot on old gaming forums where hacks were being produced.<p>When I was much younger I looked up to a game cheats writer on an old forum since he taught me about how they worked, which I found extremely cool (still do!). It actually formed my initial interest in security.<p>I asked if I could help somehow, as all young, eager noobs at the time did, and to my surprise he said yes. He wanted to track the licenses he sold to which accounts via IRC. The game would boot, hacks get injected, hacks connected to IRC and would interact with an mIRC bot to check them on his own machine. That was my first foray into socket programming and protocols, too.<p>A while after that, I learned my code had been shared with another cheats maker (not itself a problem for me) when I was contacted to add DCC SEND support, which allowed sending files via IRC. I don't remember if I came to the conclusion myself or if it was explicitly stated, but either way, the objective was clear, and I refused. I felt bad, had learned my lesson, and never contributed to that scene again.<p>That was in ca. 2006 or so. This has been going on for a long, long time.