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IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

whitehoodhacker.net

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Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#331

Post by whymauri »

jpleger wrote: post #210
jimt1234 wrote: post #206

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…

The IT in my district was so bad the students basically ran it for my middle and high school. We did all the desktop repairs and component swaps for free. I don't even think we had an "IT guy." This was 2009-2014 for me.

On the bright side, we got comfortable with computers and ended up building our own little projects (in and outside of school). In 10th grade we souped up one of the engineering lab computers by consolidating a bunch of old graphics cards and played games on it, lol.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#332

Post by pugworthy »

dmitrygr wrote: 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!

It happens at "adult" jobs too. I found a number of webcams in the organization with no password. I flipped the image on one, and sent an email to IT saying, "Hey something's wrong with the web cam - it's upside down. Oh and probably you should put a password on it ;)"

It didn't go over so well. It embarrassed them and lead to some major reprimands for me, almost to the point of losing my job for unauthorized access to systems.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#333

Post by GreenWatermelon »

Waterluvian wrote: post #229
Angostura wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What they did was wrong. It was certainly against the rules. I'm not so sure it was wrong.

If I broke into your home tonight to play a prank on you and then handed you a white paper about how to better secure it, how would you feel?

except in the case of my home all my doors were unlocked. I would definitely appreciate a paper about how to secure my home, especially if the intruder took great care not to cause any damage or disturbance.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#334

Post by mingusreedus »

my old school used this old as hell system using two solaris servers that we would connect to via thin clients. i got root creds to everything in our school district and on my very last day at that school i decided i'd do everyone a favour and at least update the system from firefox 3 to firefox 12. well, shortly after installing the package everyones clients stopped responding and that's the day i learned about dependencies. everyone kind of knew it had to be me that screwed everything, but nobody said anything and they were grateful to have gotten rid of that horrible old system.

Unfortunately they decided to replace it with windows now, but my little brother is doing a great job keeping the people managing that new system on their toes ;)

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#336

Post by kaibee »

chrisseaton wrote: post #204
sodality2 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of our top priorities was to avoid disrupting classes, meaning we could only pull off the prank before school started, during passing periods, or after school.

Their own video literally shows a class of people watching it happen.

I'm not sure what you think happens 5 minutes before the end of class on a Friday, but it isn't diligent learning.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#337

Post by c22 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #201
jancsika wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do we tolerate pranks? As the author points out early on in this article, most school districts would not have tolerated a prank like this. In fact this is the only example I know about a prank this big that got the response of toleration the author documented in the article. > You shouldn't be able to interfere with someone else and say 'just a prank bro'. The students made a report of what they did and presen…

> The students made a report of what they did and presented it to the administration. So what? Can I push you down in the street and then hand you a report explaining how I was able to push you down and that makes it all ok?

Of course that's not okay. But if you're wearing a device marketed to you as a 'force field' because you're afraid of being pushed down the street and someone demonstrates that your force field isn't working by dancing really close to you, that's probably okay.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#338

Post by mwcampbell »

I wonder how they managed to achieve perfect synchronization across the whole district, or even between IPTV players in one school. Sure, maybe that ability is built into the IPTV system, but I wonder how it's done. Did the players all sync their clocks from a central server, pre-buffer the stream, then start playing when the local clock hit a certain time?

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#339

Post by tertius »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #127
tertius wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably better to try and reform the law instead of suggest children break the law and ruin their lives.

Clarifying that the ruination of lives here is the direct result of profoundly bad laws that inappropriately criminalize benign behaviors.

Hence the need for reform.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#340

Post by yardie »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #269
jimt1234 wrote: post #206

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…

I did similar violence to my old HDD-based iPod. One day it just made a chugga chugga noise. Meaning the HDD was dead. In researching how to recover some music a forum member mentioned dropping it really hard. So I slammed it into my desk and terrified the office. And it continued working for the next few years.
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