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IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

whitehoodhacker.net

21–30 of 399 posts

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#21

Neat story, and this is clearly harmless. But isn't the most basic, fundamental, number one rule of security/pen testing to try to break into a system (no matter how weak) if and only if you've been given clearance beforehand? Why doesn't that hold here?

The rule does apply. Also, it was a senior prank, which by definition involves breaking the rules.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#22
Up until OP starts working out the frustrations of RTSP it was pretty much a yawner "scan for ports, http to them, see if sumthins there and unguarded". But the perseverance to make a prank work like that with a finicky protocol across a wide variety of different OEM hardware is really exceptional!

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#24
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got in trouble once in high school just for discovering and then using `net send` to send a message to my friend that said "Hi from lab 3". Computer lab access revoked for 6 weeks. Jokes on them, now I send socket messages to my friend that says "Hi from Chicago" and there's nothing they can do about it. My friend however keeps begging me to use this thing called 'email' because he claims he doesn't see the socket…

everyone in my school net send bombed everyone all the time. Im not sure how they didn't figure out how to just turn it off. but i remember you had to do it from a library computer, because it said who it sent it from. so you had to do a little drive by walking net send as you walked out of the library to not get caught

We would write scripts to essentially make net send DOS attacks on different labs.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#25
post #6

Many here, I am sure, got in trouble in high school for exposing security issues in school IT. So I imagine we're all very happy to see a sane response from school administration for once!

There was an excessively annoying kid in my high school and I learned to send remote commands to any computer in our lab, so I sent a command on loop that continuously opened his disk drive (it would automatically re-open after closing), and if he was particularly annoying I would shut down his computer.

I never once got in trouble for it - the teacher would ask the class, directly looking at me, from time to time to stop it, but I never got in trouble.

I imagine he was just using those announcements to get me to stop from time to time, but knew this kid deserved it so he never did more than that.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#26
post #2

The fact that the administration didn't choose to sue them to oblivion is refreshing. I hope we'll see a trend in the future of educator being smart enough to admit that they made a mistake and to encourage the students to develop their talent. One can only hope.

Probably helps that "We prepared complete documentation of everything we did, including recommendations to remediate the vulnerabilities we discovered. We went a comprehensive 26-page penetration test report to the D214 tech team and worked with them to help secure their network."

That hasn't helped in the past. Frankly I think they were naive to reveal themselves no matter what the authorities said. It hasn't gone nearly as well for other people.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#27
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad to see a kid using bash and not something like gulp PowerShell

Credit where credit is due, we all WISH *nix had something like PowerShell. Passing strings from program to program is a pain, passing around .NET objects instead is a great step forward, as can be seen by the several attempts at similar shells passing around JSON objects.

PowerShell has been available on Linux via .NET Core since 2016 and version 6.0. Even my Windows box with PowerShell 5.1 likes to remind me of this fact every time I start it:

    Windows PowerShell
    Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
    
    Try the new cross-platform PowerShell https://aka.ms/pscore6

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#28
post #8
post #2

The fact that the administration didn't choose to sue them to oblivion is refreshing. I hope we'll see a trend in the future of educator being smart enough to admit that they made a mistake and to encourage the students to develop their talent. One can only hope.

Being a minor probably helps. There are so many laws today. It's too risky to do this. It's not like it was 25 years ago.

It can get pretty messy. For example, they could wait until they're 21 to try them as an adult, even if it was committed at 17 or younger [0 p. 128]:

> a person who committed the offense before his eighteenth birthday, but is over twenty-one on the date formal charges are filed, may be prosecuted as an adult.... This is true even where the government could have charged the juvenile prior to his twenty-first birthday, but did not.

However, the statute of limitations for CFAA violations is 2 years [1 p. 2] so this might not apply. If somehow they can still go after him at 21, this post could play a part in evidence for performing the hack (I truly hope not).

0: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-ccips/l...

1: https://www.goodwinlaw.com/-/media/files/publications/10_01-...

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#30
post #4
post #2

The fact that the administration didn't choose to sue them to oblivion is refreshing. I hope we'll see a trend in the future of educator being smart enough to admit that they made a mistake and to encourage the students to develop their talent. One can only hope.

I'm glad to see a kid using bash and not something like gulp PowerShell

You're glad to see them using the ancient clusterfuck that is Bash, and not a modern relatively sane shell that is indisputably the most seminal shell in the last 30 years?
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