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IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

whitehoodhacker.net

241–250 of 399 posts

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#241

Preface this by saying this was a smaller school, and the students had limited access to wifi. For example a teacher would create a set of radius credentials that would only be active for 1 hour. Since data was also expensive that was not an easy work around. In my grade 11 electronics class, one project we were assigned was to create a digital clock with notifications for one of the teachers. Me and a friend set up…

Nice! I used to carry around a wireless router in my backpack for the same reason, and made sure to surreptitiously plug it in at the back of every class. Similarly, the school had very restricted WiFi, but no restrictions on the wired network. Fun times.

For sure lots of fun, we also very quickly found the staff wifi password, and just cloned mac addresses of allowed devices to bypass the filtering.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Passing strings from program to program is a pain The internet has been pretty successful and many popular protocols (http, smtp, etc) are exactly "passing strings from program to program"

And behind the scenes of internet-based services there's a whole ecosystem of "how can we do shit more robustly than just passing strings around" (or even for "better than XML or JSON").

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#243
> With that said, what we did was very illegal, and other administrations may have pressed charges. We are grateful that the D214 administration was so understanding.

Note well that the victim of a crime does not get any say in whether or not a prosecutor prosecutes a crime. "Pressing charges" is a myth.

The prosecutor decides. Period.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#244

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.

Another good one on that level was using the Windows keyboard shortcut ctrl-alt-down to rotate the display upside down - totally harmless, but absolutely maddening if you don’t know how to undo it

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#245
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.

"sue" suggests civil action and a decision by the wronged party.

They're lucky a prosecutor didn't prosecute them for criminal activity. The school would not have any say about whether or not this happens.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#246
post #209
post #103

Reminds of me my school leaving prank. I rewrote the whole internet on my school's computers. Google's logo became "Leavers '08", Facebook became "Hatebook" and was red, YouTube only played videos of cats, amongst other things. These were the days when nothing had SSL, so you could just intercept and rewrite traffic! My only requirement was: do no actual damage It was implemented as a Debian live CD that you could dr…

based on http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html by chance? or parallel evolution? :D

Hah! I have vague memories of this. I think this might have inspired it, yes.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#247

Working in IT/tech for school district is the worst. My experience from many years ago - around 2002, I think: 1. First day on the job, email to boss: "Hey, the computer lab at Springfield High has a ton of known security flaws that are begging to be exploited." 2. Reply, 1 week later: "Sorry, we don't have any money for that. Just keep everything up-and-running." 3. 3 weeks later the computer lab at Springfield High…

> All the computers displayed a popup window When I engaged in `net send` shenanigans at the local community college, at least the IT staff was smart enough to know where to scramble a runner whenever those dialog boxes popped up across campus. "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" was quite the meme then, but apparently they thought it was some form of cyber-terrorism.

A good buddy of mine did the same, but with the message "DOOM!"

His punishment was community service, and the service was having to be basically an intern for the school IT guy. Smart administration, really.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#248
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the computers displayed a popup window When I engaged in `net send` shenanigans at the local community college, at least the IT staff was smart enough to know where to scramble a runner whenever those dialog boxes popped up across campus. "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" was quite the meme then, but apparently they thought it was some form of cyber-terrorism.

A good buddy of mine did the same, but with the message "DOOM!" His punishment was community service, and the service was having to be basically an intern for the school IT guy. Smart administration, really.

That's such a wholesome punishment.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#249

Working in IT/tech for school district is the worst. My experience from many years ago - around 2002, I think: 1. First day on the job, email to boss: "Hey, the computer lab at Springfield High has a ton of known security flaws that are begging to be exploited." 2. Reply, 1 week later: "Sorry, we don't have any money for that. Just keep everything up-and-running." 3. 3 weeks later the computer lab at Springfield High…

> All the computers displayed a popup window When I engaged in `net send` shenanigans at the local community college, at least the IT staff was smart enough to know where to scramble a runner whenever those dialog boxes popped up across campus. "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" was quite the meme then, but apparently they thought it was some form of cyber-terrorism.

I haven’t thought of net send in years. Circa 2000 I worked at Cisco and added some javascript to my profile in the corporate directory that sent me a net send message with the hostname of the computer that viewed my profile. At that time the hostname usually included the employees username, so I had a nice heads up that somebody was looking me up.

I should have left it at that, but Ingot cheeky and also did a net send back to the origin saying something like “thanks for your interest in onionisafruit”. That got escalated and I was threatened with disciplinary action. It didn’t occur to IT that they shouldn’t allow arbitrary script tags in user profiles. The best response was just to threaten the people who were creative with what they were given.

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