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IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

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Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#361

Post by judge2020 »

pronlover723 wrote: post #254
matheusmoreira wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don't have any money for that They always have the money. They just don't care about doing things properly. It simply isn't a priority for them. Makes me feel good when someone comes and exploits their negligence. It's like divine retribution and they're doing god's work. They tempt fate and the gods punish them by making them pay more than they would have paid had they done things right. Amazing.

Except they don't pay, you and all the other citizens pay via taxes

They don't personally pay. But they still have to balance the budget, and the more that's spent to help with gentrification of the surrounding area (such as via nice football fields, good teachers/a good greatschools rating, well-kept grounds and events) can help lead to increased future funding and thus a bigger paycheck, at least within 5-25 years.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#362

Post by geoffpado »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #352
acidburnNSA wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"stiction". Well known in the Apple community in the ... late 80's/early 90's, IIRC? I want to say I remember some official Apple documentation saying to drop the machine from a few inches up in the air, but I may be misremembering.

This was supposedly true of the Apple III (https://www.techjunkie.com/apple-iii-drop/), but upon searching to find that link, it seems this story may be apocryphal: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12283/did...

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#363

Post by severak_cz »

dyingkneepad wrote: post #51

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.

Change wallpaper to some crap. Take a screenshot of desktop. Change wallpaper back and open screenshot with crap on the background in fullscreen mode.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#364

Post by Cyphase »

snerbles wrote: post #226
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…

> 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.

Loving all these net send stories. Back in the day I wrote a C++ program that was basically an IM interface on top of net send. Fun times.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#365

Post by niccl »

shwoopdiwoop wrote: post #321
acidburnNSA wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 believe the term for this is ‘percussive maintenance’

A few years ago a friend ran a camera shop. From time to time someone would come in with an SLR that wouldn't behave (long exposure, no exposure, nothing in viewfinder). He'd take it, tell them to go away and come back in an hour, then hit it on a telephone directory. 9 times out of 10 that would free the stuck/sticking mirror and everything would be fine. He had to tell the customer to go away, though, so they didn't get agitated seeing him bash their expensive SLR around

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#366

Post by _crgg »

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 loved working IT for a school district. My favorite memory/story is the time a woman called the cops on me for talking on my cellphone in the parking lot. lol

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#367

Post by mastersummoner »

ipdashc wrote: post #268
koboll wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 try…

Nice Mitnick callback.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#368

Post by beambot »

earksiinni wrote: post #82

Serious question. What, if any, instruction do kids these days receive regarding what's allowed on computer systems? I remember in high school poking around a network drive until I found an executable with the name "SEND" in the name. I had a sense that it would send some kind of message somewhere, but I honestly didn't know where or to how many people. I was quite surprised when all the screens in our computer lab f…

Good old "net send." Out of all the things, that was the one I got chewed out about too.

Wasn't a regular MS user, but we were in a computer training lab at a company for "computer day" field trip. Was bored during instructions, so naturally I logged in, found "net send", and sent a few crank messages to classmates using * as destination. Everyone, including the instructor, got a good laugh.

Approached later in day by corporate IT. Apparently the lab had poor routing rules, no firewalls, and sat on the main Corp network. My messages were received on 25,000 terminals.

Thankfully, they recognized this as (a) harmless, and (b) their own lax failure. No adverse outcome.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#369

Post by cinquemb »

bfirsh wrote: post #221
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a common issue with distributed systems. Something has to be "the leader" and you need a system for choosing a new one once the old one is offline for a certain amount of time. Add in a sprinkling of how to figure out if you have more than one leader active at a time.

Would it have needed leader election though? It's a stateless system. It might have been enough to ignore spoofed ARP replies, or to not attack machines of its own kind.

Yeah, even in state systems, i think some sort of gossip protocol could work as long as the part of the state is being decided on is not in contention with another nodes response during a round of sampling.

Re: IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district

#370

Post by ironmagma »

javajosh wrote: post #356
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…

People respond to incentives, and "fast-to-react" is easier to measure than "wisely proactive" in at least two ways. First, the risk is no longer theoretical; the damage was measured. Second, the fix is easy to measure: spend $X dollars on Y firm on date Z. This is all nice, easy to understand evidence of a manager doing their job. Alternatively, you have staff pointing out a possible flaw. That staff's time was alre…

Just in case any onlookers need it spelled out, the phrase “easier to measure” in this case is vastly different from “better.”
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