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When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995

mmccaff.github.io

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Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995

#41

Post by noonespecial »

andai wrote: post #31
noonespecial wrote: post #25

My 'episode' was in '93. I'd just learned about TSR's and execution vectors and really wanted to try to write a floppy disk boot sector virus. Coded it up in turbo pascal. Thought I was being ultra careful: promptly spread it everywhere. My school was much more laid back, thankfully.

What safeguards did you build in to it?

I wrote, in big red letters on the disk, "Don't insert into computers with hard disks or with other floppies."

I can't imagine how this could have failed...

Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995

#43

Post by orthecreedence »

Was the early 2000s, but in my high school library I did a

   NET SEND comp1231 i know where you live
to mess with my friend who was sitting right next to me. Then the hacker in me decided to see if asterisk worked (of course, without changing the message)

   NET SEND * i know where you live
(Hint: it works). Everyone in the school who had a computer on got the message. I caught hell for that one, had to write a letter of apology to a bunch of school staff who didn't "feel safe" after receiving the message. Never got access to my account after that either, so I always had to get my friends to log me in.

I didn't break the network...but hey, I helped expose a vulnerability, right? That's something.

Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995

#44

Post by [deleted] »

orthecreedence wrote: post #43

Was the early 2000s, but in my high school library I did a NET SEND comp1231 i know where you live to mess with my friend who was sitting right next to me. Then the hacker in me decided to see if asterisk worked (of course, without changing the message) NET SEND * i know where you live (Hint: it works). Everyone in the school who had a computer on got the message. I caught hell for that one, had to write a letter of…

[deleted]

Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995

#45

Post by wjh_ »

In 2015 (perhaps more recent than other comments...) I was in trouble for starting powershell via a shortcut and using it to kill the monitoring process. Apparently it was "causing intentional damage", when in fact I just wanted to finish reading something online after the teacher disabled the internet.

Luckily they didn't take it any further than a stern telling off, unlike the article.

On top of that, I had actually revealed a vulnerability allowing anyone to access anyone elses' files earlier in the year.

Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995

#47

Post by duncan_bayne »

canadian_voter wrote: post #13

One tech savvy friend was called in for questioning and told that he was going to be blamed for everything and that they had enough information to prove it was him even if it wasn’t. He was going to be expelled unless he had any information that he could share to prove otherwise. Classic interrogation technique. I also learned a lot about how police states work when I was in high school.

Speaking as a parent, it's hard to find a school that actually values learning and development, and isn't some sort of cross between Police detention and daycare.

We were lucky enough to find such a school reasonably nearby but the cost - despite their genuine efforts to keep them low - are scary.

Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995

#48

Post by merb »

devrandomguy wrote: post #8

Ah, good times. Win95 used to crash so much, that my brother and I became quite adept at resurrecting Explorer by causing a surviving process to trigger it. Eventually, we discovered the infamous "Login? No, just help yourself to the desktop" hack. No one cared, it was normal for stuff to be broken. https://imgur.com/rG0p0b2

on windows 95/98 in most networks you could just click cancel since the anonymous logon wasn't even disabled.

Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995

#49

Post by merb »

predakanga wrote: post #7
noir_lord wrote: post #6

I had to personally apologise to the IT department because I sent a message from 'God' saying "I saw what you did last night" to the entire network (long time ago but it was Novell something) by mistake (was aiming to send it to just the one computer lab). They thought it was hilarious and that was the end of the matter.

Similar story here - mine was in the days of Windows 9x; everyone knew about "net send", but few bothered to look into the other options. I decided to poke at it and see what "/forest" did, ended up messaging the entire network with a harmless "Hello world". It's shocking to see the ordeal that mmccaff went through; for me it was just a couple of very confused teachers and an IT department that wanted to keep an eye…

shutdown /i ... :)
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