I feel so dumb when I read kids doing these things. Back in High School all I knew was how I could run arbitrary executable files by renaming them to calc.exe. We also did the classic "take a screenshot of the desktop, set it as the wallpaper, then remove all icons and the start menu" thing.
IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
51–60 of 399 posts
Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The students were extremely lucky. The advice given to me in high school (I was working on tech projects after school for several teachers and groups) was to not even try or explore poking around the IT networks it no matter how good my intentions were. All it takes is one grumpy school administrator to feel undermined or to misunderstand your report and you could be expelled. When you're in a position like a student…
Seconded, the same advice has also been given to me back in India.
"Know where your boundaries are and who your stakeholders are, don't do anything that will make your stakeholders look bad." It's a life advice given to me by my high school teacher that served me well in my professional life.
Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The students were extremely lucky. The advice given to me in high school (I was working on tech projects after school for several teachers and groups) was to not even try or explore poking around the IT networks it no matter how good my intentions were. All it takes is one grumpy school administrator to feel undermined or to misunderstand your report and you could be expelled. When you're in a position like a student…
Seconded, the same advice has also been given to me back in India. "Know where your boundaries are and who your stakeholders are, don't do anything that will make your stakeholders look bad." It's a life advice given to me by my high school teacher that served me well in my professional life.
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Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
25 years ago wasn’t any better… I recall several in my circle getting suspended for harmless things. The lesson: don’t explore, don’t be curious, and don’t try to fix anything related to the school and computers. Sigh.
Consent is paramount when doing that type of exploration. Without explicit permission, how would an IT administrator distinguish the difference between a curious student and a malicious attacker?
Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The students were extremely lucky. The advice given to me in high school (I was working on tech projects after school for several teachers and groups) was to not even try or explore poking around the IT networks it no matter how good my intentions were. All it takes is one grumpy school administrator to feel undermined or to misunderstand your report and you could be expelled. When you're in a position like a student…
Yep - I, like many of my friends and people who are naturally curious and work today in "Cybersecurity" had fun, poked around - but once you found little data troves - it reveals how inept alot of people can be.
And you just volunteer to be thrown under the bus as that "hacker."
Anonymous, maybe. As a student, under 18 - you're "immune" from many things - but it can be a stain.
Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#56The 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.
Yep. What they did was wrong. And by doing so they threw themselves at the mercy of the entity they hacked. The refreshing part is that the entity did the morally right thing and showed mercy.
Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#57I thought I was cool being able to modify the ready message on printers across the school network. This is really impressive.
I wrote an infinite loop in postscript and sent it to all the printers. This was when postscript printers cost a fortune so there were not many of them. Fun days were those.
Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Well at least it's a racing horse and not a turtle.
Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#59About two years ago, I was in high school and decided to, as a joke, “hack” the computer. By logging in as admn:password. I was incredibly surprised when it actually ended up working as a domain admin account. After checking this, I immediately signed out.
When my CS teacher filed a ticket asking “who has the user account ‘admin’ and why is the password ‘password?’” IT wanted to revoke my network login and probably put me in ISS for a few days. Fortunately, my CS teacher didn’t reveal who I was.
Very glad IT at this person’s school took it in stride, unfortunately this was just the MO of IT in my district.
Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
#60I'm impressed with how much foresight this high schooler had in preparing for the prank. My impression is that most high school age kids would out themselves within the first few weeks of planning due to wanting to boast, here they instead took to testing covertly, overnight.