Gather around, children. Put down your Rust-compiled eBPF probes, your Sigma rules, your billion-dollar EDR consoles. Sit on this pile of old floppy disks and let me tell you a story. A story of a time when a 56k modem was a weapon of mass destruction, when your entire operational infrastructure was a Windows 98 machine with a sticky residue on the keyboard, and when the most sophisticated command-and-control channel available to you was a chat room full of teenagers arguing about Linkin Park. Ai miei tempi , we hacked with character. The golden age of the RAT It all started, more or less, in 1998, when a group called Cult of the Dead Cow released something called Back Orifice at DEF CON. The name was a deliberate pun on Microsoft BackOffice, juvenile, precise, and entirely on brand for a group that understood that naming things well was half the battle. It was a Remote Administration Tool that let you control a Windows 95/98 machine remotely: browse files, capture screens, log keystrokes, redirect ports.…