Live data from Hacker News

IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

whitehoodhacker.net

261–270 of 399 posts

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#262
post #213
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…

Used to be that Windows allowed programs to hook into each others’ event busses. (It might still, I’m not sure.) This might be why a few of my Highschool’s computers would interpret every 5th right click in minesweeper as a left click

I ran into a fun bug in W10 where my arrow keys were moving the mouse cursor around. Turns out MS Paint does this as a feature and somehow it leaked beyond Paint.

https://superuser.com/questions/1467313/mouse-pointer-moving...

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#264
We figured out that our computer class had a few computers infected by the Ambulance virus[0]. So of course we intentionally infected all the computers with it =)

On the other hand me and a few of my friends were the only computer literate people in the school and were tasked with removing it in the end.

But still, it was fun seeing a whole class of computers have an ambulance run at the bottom of the screen with the poor beeper emulating the siren.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulance_(computer_virus)

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing that script? I have been looking for something simmiliar, but didn't find anything that worked well and did not have the time yet to give it a try myself. I would really appreciate it.

Sure. I didn't want to engage in self-promotion, but since you asked, here's the website and source code. There is an installer, but it's kind of old. I suggest installing AutoHotkey itself, then download the JKLmouse.ahk and JKLmouse.ico files from GitHub, and put a shortcut to the .ahk in your Startup folder. https://www.jklmouse.com/ https://github.com/geary/jklmouse/tree/master/AutoHotkey/Sou... One thing to note…

This is really cool. It's like the Mouse feature if QMK but works with any keyboard!

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#266

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…

Are you me?! This basically was my experience working for a very large school district in the early 2000's. My favorite was they asked me to train a school bus driver to be the newest member of the IT staff because "they wanted to learn computers", it also just so happened that this person was the only person their budget could afford (less than 40k/year). I worked for them as a contractor for a while and one of the…

That’s hilarious, at a small school our bus driver was the local it admin… 7 minutes of rainbow tables with ophcrack live cd was all it took to become domain admin.. never changed it for all 4 years lol.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#267

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.

O mannn I was suspended from HS, and banned for 2 years from touching school computers for net send shenanigans as I wasn't smart enough to cloak the originating workstation.

My message to every single computer in our HS:

"Hey what's up!"

my friend added to this:

"Your network (H:/) drive is being deleted."

School administrators and teachers did not find this funny.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#268
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 the only proper response, really. You love to see it.

I'll never understand braindead school administrators whose response is "throw the entire CFAA book at them" for kids who do the most harmless sort of "hacking". I mean, they're literally 16-year-olds. How disconnected from reality does one have to be to think that police/legal action is appropriate for this type of stuff? It's like they're specifically trying to ruin lives and create criminals/blackhats.

Edit: And something I remembered while scrolling this thread... it's particularly disappointing when it's the actual IT staff who get mad and threaten to press charges. Like, sure, if it's a 60-year-old secretary who's worried about you starting WWIII by whistling into a payphone, that's just ignorance, that's one thing. But IT people ought to know enough about security/"hacking" to see how ridiculous they're being... just sad.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#269

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…

I 'worked' for my own high school's IT dept, a few hours a week, as a student. It was an amazing experience working with those guys. I learned so many things, from how to punch, terminate, and run cables to how to set up a Ghost image and deploy it en masse across the district.

One day one of the old macs was showing the frowny face in a in-session classroom. Boss sent me down there with specific instructions: "pull out the hard drive and beat it really hard with the handle of this screwdriver". I was like: "?" and he was like, "just do it".

So I go down there and let myself in, trying not to interrupt the class. I climb behind the computer on a cart and pull out the HD. I beat it with the handle, like a good 10 times. Of course this got the class all riled up. I blushed, but told them this was normal operating procedure. Plug it back in and it works. I was (secretly) as amazed as everyone else in the class.

Back in the IT office, I say it worked. IT boss smiles and nods. I ask how. Well as it turns out some of those old hard drives used a vegetable oil based lube that seizes up if it's not used for a while. So if you bash it it un-seizes and starts turning again.

Anyway great times, fun memories. We all got our CompTIA A+ certifications at the end, but don't ask me what IRQ number is for the parallel port these days.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#270
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…

I don't think this happened.

I did some similar shenanigans when in 10th grade, with backtrack 3 and ettercap-ng it was pretty easy. I didn’t do the load balancing, and ended up crashing the network when my laptop couldn’t keep up lol.
Post reply on HN