"most people", I agree. Being a broke kid, I recall trying to figure out how to break different schemes. BBS Doors were my main target. I was horrible at it, but some things were learned.
I was hired as computer assembly tech at a local computer store when young. There was a customer that was frequently delinquent. The boss asked me to write a program to encrypt the hard drive if the customer hadn't paid. This customer had a business so I was very nervous about my lack of confidence in being certain their data was not lost. To compromise, only filenames and extensions were changed. IIRC, the bill was receive a payment weekly. Once the money was received, a code was given to the customer. This code would update a file on their system. If, after two weeks, no payment was received, the code would recurse through the directories and rename data files with a simple XOR. This would allow files to be recovered manually if needed. I'm not certain, but I think this was done in dbase 2000. It was the only compiler we had access to at the time.
I was hired as computer assembly tech at a local computer store when young. There was a customer that was frequently delinquent. The boss asked me to write a program to encrypt the hard drive if the customer hadn't paid. This customer had a business so I was very nervous about my lack of confidence in being certain their data was not lost. To compromise, only filenames and extensions were changed. IIRC, the bill was receive a payment weekly. Once the money was received, a code was given to the customer. This code would update a file on their system. If, after two weeks, no payment was received, the code would recurse through the directories and rename data files with a simple XOR. This would allow files to be recovered manually if needed. I'm not certain, but I think this was done in dbase 2000. It was the only compiler we had access to at the time.