Why Habbo?
Today, it’s J-Day 2010. One year ago, at February 12th, 2009, Josh ‘Jeax’ Comery got arrested at his home in Sittingbourne and brought to court later. Accuser: Sulake Oy, the company behind Habbo Hotel. Jeax was the developer of Habbo scripting applications such as Axed 7, which, accordingly to Sulake, did 20,000 GBP damage to them. He was found guilty and was sentenced to community service. Ex-teenagers like Joeh, Jeax, Myrax, SonicMouse, office.boy, myself and many many others, spent quite some time writing Habbo scripting applications or server emulators. For most of them, it’s safe to say that it ‘got them into programming’. With this post I would like to explain why Habbo has been the perfect ‘programming playground’ for alot of us.
The birth of ‘Habbo scripting’
I think it’s because Habbo started out really hobby’ish and amateur, Aapo was kinda a pioneer back in 2000 when they (Sampo wasn’t the techie, he was the concept & designer guy) made Mobiles Disco, Hotelli Kultakala and ofcourse the first Habbo versions. Old Habbo (V1 etc) was a popular game for teens, and people would be strifing to all kinds of exclusive stuff to show off how awesome they were. Habbo was very prone to ’scripting’. By simply using memory editing apps such as ArtMoney, people could edit the figure of their avatar or place posters ‘outside of the room’, aka Posters-In-Black. To do more advanced ’scripting’, they would need a ‘man-in-the-middle’, a program that stands between the Habbo server and your Habbo client. Such a program allows you to view and alter network traffic and these apps could be quickly made in Microsoft Visual Basic. For alot of ‘Habbo scripters’, this was their first step into programming. Alot of these mini programs could easily do alot of ‘cool stuff’ to Habbo. If you see the stuff that they could do to Habbo back then, you would say to yourself ‘how was this even possible?’, server quality & security must have been hella poor back in the old days -- probably because Sulake was a pioneer at this market. They didn’t expect that kids would catch up to them so fast?
Advanced Habbo scripting
When Habbo kept developing through the years, alot of these old scripts were patched. But with the introduction of new features, there were always kids around that found out how to exploit them. It encouraged them to find more and better exploits, pressuring the developers to do something to it by filtering client data, changing encryption implementations and security-through-obscurity. This made Habbo a challenging ‘opponent’, it forced the scripters to innovate in their programming skills. Later, when the RC4 encryption class (Java sourcecode) was ‘leaked’, people worked out how to encrypt and decrypt data themselves in such a manner that the Habbo server accepted their data. With this, they could send their own data to the server with the click of a button, while the server ‘thought’ that it was the Habbo client issueing that data. By creating alot of Habbo users, connect them to the Habbo server all together, sending the data that the original client sends, people could make ‘bot raids’, Habbo users that were controlled by a computer instead of a human. This was good fun, and programs such as Jeax’s Axed 7 (it got him arrested though), allowed people to load in lists of Habbo accounts and then march them through the rooms. You could make them chat, dance etc all together, making military style operations and spamming rooms with your websites etc.
The original Axed 7 app in action
Modification of Axed 7, to work with the new encryption algortithm
Habbo bots got even better, when a group of Dutchies (naming themselves ‘Moderators of Death’ aka MoD), found out how they could mass-submit Habbo user creation, allowing them to create hundreds of accounts with the same avatar figure and a random name in a few seconds. They wrote a small application that created alot of Habbo accounts, automatically logged them in and made them enter the rooms. The bots were all dressed in the same and only said a few things, next to spreading the URL where people could download the program. The end-user just had to download the program, start it and leave the process running -- they would automatically contribute to the chaos. Alot of newbies didn’t know what they were doing and got IP banned for all their accounts because they were running bots from their IP too. Next to this massive (!) bot attack they also did some other scripting exploits, and all together it has been the biggest ‘Habbo scripting operation’ so far. This only happened on the Dutch Habbo Hotel, habbo.nl, and I don’t know how many bots were involved, but all rooms were crammed with bots, causing panic among the children playing.
The Moderators of Death (MoD) bot raid at Habbo.nl back in 2007
Habbo server emulation and private servers
Then, the most challenging Habbo programming thing: server emulation. People have been writing complete server emulators, for educational purposes or for running their own ‘Habbo Hotel’. This allowed them to run their own copy of Habbo with it’s own staff and moderation team, giving them access to all features. It started out with a buggy ‘V1 client’ server emulator in VB6, but the servers have been rewritten and improved over the years, they were adapted & developed constantly to support the newest Habbo client versions. Basically it involved writing a multi user socket server with a database, and then process data from clients and performing the appropriate server logic that the Habbo server did too. I have written the majority of the DebboProject V3 and up server, which was the most used Habbo emulator back in 2007. End of 2007 I started the Holograph Emulator project, which, even though it was ‘open source’, was mainly written by me. Meth0d wrote a frontend site similar to the real Habbo’s, called ‘HoloCMS’. Together it allowed any noob off the street to start his own Habbo Hotel, and today it’s used to power most of the private servers, the small ones (~50 users online) and the bigger ones (hundreds of users online).
Sunnieday.net, one of the biggest Habbo private servers around. Pay attention to the amount of online users…
The big private servers have turned into ‘money machines’ for the people who run them. I have seen AdSense bills of people squeezing 500 euros/month out of their private server, and this is solely off Google advertisements. Next to the ads and similar to the real Habbo Hotel, they sell ingame properties such as credits, badges and special furniture items. These ‘Habbo retros’ have been causing alot of issues for Sulake, taking away their potential customers and, according to Sulake, scamming & “installing harmful software on your computer” -- which is impossible by the way. Sulake even held their international ‘Keep It Real’ campaign in all Habbo Hotels worldwide, to discourage people from going on the private servers. Sadly, this generated alot of attention for the private servers and only attracted more people to them…
Conclusion
Myself, I have enjoyed scripting & programming Habbo stuff over the years. My projects taught me (and others) programming languages such as BASIC, C#, Java, PHP and work with databases like MySQL. It also was a good lession on security and reverse engineering. What started out as fun ‘n games, evolved into the strife for better and complex computer programs. Sulake’s product was a challenging ‘opponent’ that kept getting tougher over the years -- and so did we.
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