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Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

edna.land

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Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#21

Post by jerf »

realo wrote: post #13
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

> At some point, I hit a threshold where the DNS server could no longer keep up and broke. As I later found out, this caused a ~15 minute campus wide outage for managed computers as no computer could make the DNS lookup in order to mount its network drive. IT politely told me to stop spamming the DNS server after this, so I did. > How’d IT know it was me? I yapped about it for two weeks! You know, I think maybe the f…

Wow. No police, no handcuffs, no lawyers... Just a polite request. This must be happening in some alternate universe.

If universities jailed everyone who did something stupid on their network, they'd have to close their computer science department for lack of students.

I once stood up a DHCP server without realizing I'd start serving addresses to my entire dorm. I shut it down after just a minute or so having served 10 or 15 addresses out. A few minutes later my dorm phone rang asking about what I had done. Fortunately I could say with a straight face I'd already shut it down.

(Before anyone says "why didn't they just", this would be 1997 or 1998. Networks and their tooling have come a long way since then.)

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#22

Post by quietsegfault »

jerf wrote: post #21
realo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. No police, no handcuffs, no lawyers... Just a polite request. This must be happening in some alternate universe.

If universities jailed everyone who did something stupid on their network, they'd have to close their computer science department for lack of students. I once stood up a DHCP server without realizing I'd start serving addresses to my entire dorm. I shut it down after just a minute or so having served 10 or 15 addresses out. A few minutes later my dorm phone rang asking about what I had done. Fortunately I could say w…

I got my first job in technology when I moved into my dorm freshman year. I had been looking forward to having Ethernet for a while, and once I plugged it in, no network. I realized that they still needed to assign IP addresses, and no network admin was around, so I watched the network, found free IPs, and spun up a DHCP server that gave out these free IPs. A few hours later my port shut off, and the network manager came to my room, asked what I did. I explained, and he offered me a job on the spot. I worked in networking for the university until I hooked up with the Unix guys, and my tech career shot up like a rocket from there. This was late 90s early 00s, so no fear of prosecution then. Hell, we ran a nearly-officially-sanctioned file sharing service when the internet handoff got too busy and we needed people downloading music and movies to lay off. The server ran in a rack in the datacenter for a few years until the MPAA paid a visit.

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#23

Post by quietsegfault »

63 wrote: post #17

Even running a port scanner is enough to face disciplinary action at many US colleges. Taking down the network for the entire school for 15 minutes surely deserved more consequences than were doled out here. I'd encourage the author to focus their efforts and talents on something more constructive.

Why would they deserve “more consequences”? Academia isn’t the real world. It’s a place where people can learn how to interact with the world as an adult. People should be encouraged to experiment (within reason) and if there is no actual bad intent, consequences should focus on learning rather than punishment.

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#24

Post by quietsegfault »

breakingcups wrote: post #15

Seems a bit too irresponsible and immature for my taste.

It’s university. It’s the time to be irresponsible and immature. When I worked managing serious high performance computing systems at a university and my job relied on the network. When the network failed, we would just go to the bar and have a couple drinks. It’s really not that big a deal.

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#26

Post by varenc »

miki123211 wrote: post #12

The PTR record enumeration trick is often fun to try on hotel and other public networks. The problem here is that many places segment their guest network away from the internal one, but they use the same DNS server for both, so guests can still resolve internal hostnames and perform rev DNS queries. I usually like to run a traceroute or two (to some arbitrary external IP like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8) whenever I connect to…

I also love PTR record numeration using broadcast mDNS/Bonjour. Instead of relying on a central server, you send out the same sort of DNS query but as a broadcast packet:

    dig -x 192.168.1.1 @224.0.0.251 -p 5353
This gets you the .local address of a device. Of course, fewer things support mDNS. But it will often come up with interesting details. On Apple devices, you can also retrieve the model number via mDNS.

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#28

Post by ronsor »

63 wrote: post #17

Even running a port scanner is enough to face disciplinary action at many US colleges. Taking down the network for the entire school for 15 minutes surely deserved more consequences than were doled out here. I'd encourage the author to focus their efforts and talents on something more constructive.

Excessive "consequences" don't encourage "better behavior," they incentivize more secrecy.

And eventually the knowledge gets out anyway and someone who doesn't care does more damage that's harder to clean up.

Re: Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

#29

Post by KennyBlanken »

jerf wrote: post #21
realo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. No police, no handcuffs, no lawyers... Just a polite request. This must be happening in some alternate universe.

If universities jailed everyone who did something stupid on their network, they'd have to close their computer science department for lack of students. I once stood up a DHCP server without realizing I'd start serving addresses to my entire dorm. I shut it down after just a minute or so having served 10 or 15 addresses out. A few minutes later my dorm phone rang asking about what I had done. Fortunately I could say w…

There is a big difference between accidentally doing something, realizing quickly that you did it, and correcting it...not to mention only causing a minor problem for less than a dozen people...

...and intentionally pushing campus-wide infrastructure really hard (mostly because something isn't happening as fast as you would prefer), breaking the entire campus network (of a school with 7,000 students), and then proudly bragging that you broke that infrastructure.

...and then proudly bragging about that...

This kid has a huge ego that is going to get him into a lot of trouble some day when he swings his dick on a network where people are Not Amused.

I'm going to guess his next run-in will be at an internship or his first job, and he'll get fired.

Getting hauled into the dean's office and being told he'd lost the privilege to do any network 'investigating' outside of direct supervision in a pre-approved academic project would do a great job of correcting the inflation level of his ego and keep him from doing the same thing later where the people who run it are Not Amused and there are serious consequences.

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