I was expelled from a "science and technology" magnet school for finding some holes in their network. The IT admin's password was "north" so I could basically do anything.
Based on the way they did logins (Novell on Win2k workstations) any time a user logged in on a machine, I could get their password. It was a matter of booting a live linux distro, mounting a usb stick, copying a few files from the windows drive over to the usb stick, and then brute forcing once I got home.
I screwed around a little bit, rebooting various Netware servers from the web admin for fun. Unfortunately the "shut down" button does a graceful shutdown and sends a message to every single machine on the network... so it wasn't very stealth. All in all, I never did a single malicious thing. I explored their network, restarted some servers, and logged in as a teacher occasionally to screencap the "Logout blah teacher name" to show off to my buddies. Never once did I look at anyones personal documents or change any grades. I was a pussy, just an explorer.
Long story short, being a cocky 16 year old kid with a ton of user passwords, I blogged about it and got nailed. The way they handled it wash horrible, literally dragging me and my buddies out of class by the arm and cursing at us for embarrassing the school. This all happened the day after returning from a thanksgiving break, but the interesting thing is one of the teachers there was dragged into the "investigation" (every single post/page on my blog was printed into little booklets for the majority of the staff to read and analyze) and personally called me the day before the break, to let me know that I better watch my ass.
I'm a good guy, I give money back to people who drop it on the sidewalk, give up my seat on the bus to women, kids, and the elderly, etc... but they didn't realize it. The staff there is so elite because their public magnet school only gets the "smart" kids in the district. They kicked me out as soon as they had the chance. Their infrastructure is probably still vulnerable and their IT staff are just as clueless. I'd have happily done anything that I could to prevent other jacknobs in the school from doing what I did, if they had just asked for my help or even just noticed there was a problem and made changes. Instead... I'm some crazy hacker kid who doesn't belong amongst the elite kids.
I remember booting a live cd once before I even had a reputation at the school, and it was as though I was beating off in church. People were so incredibly offended by the terminal and lack of gui, like I was some kind of hacker just waiting to destroy everything.
Looking back.. I wish I hadn't been such a wimpy 10th grader. I should have screwed around way more in high school. For some reason the second I was expelled and sent to the "normal" high school I grew some balls and started acting like a regular teenager.
Oh yeah the dump I speak of is called Clark Magnet and it's in La Crescenta, California.
I was expelled from a "science and technology" magnet school for finding some holes in their network. The IT admin's password was "north" so I could basically do anything.
Based on the way they did logins (Novell on Win2k workstations) any time a user logged in on a machine, I could get their password. It was a matter of booting a live linux distro, mounting a usb stick, copying a few files from the windows drive over to the usb stick, and then brute forcing once I got home.
I screwed around a little bit, rebooting various Netware servers from the web admin for fun. Unfortunately the "shut down" button does a graceful shutdown and sends a message to every single machine on the network... so it wasn't very stealth. All in all, I never did a single malicious thing. I explored their network, restarted some servers, and logged in as a teacher occasionally to screencap the "Logout blah teacher name" to show off to my buddies. Never once did I look at anyones personal documents or change any grades. I was a pussy, just an explorer.
Long story short, being a cocky 16 year old kid with a ton of user passwords, I blogged about it and got nailed. The way they handled it wash horrible, literally dragging me and my buddies out of class by the arm and cursing at us for embarrassing the school. This all happened the day after returning from a thanksgiving break, but the interesting thing is one of the teachers there was dragged into the "investigation" (every single post/page on my blog was printed into little booklets for the majority of the staff to read and analyze) and personally called me the day before the break, to let me know that I better watch my ass.
I'm a good guy, I give money back to people who drop it on the sidewalk, give up my seat on the bus to women, kids, and the elderly, etc... but they didn't realize it. The staff there is so elite because their public magnet school only gets the "smart" kids in the district. They kicked me out as soon as they had the chance. Their infrastructure is probably still vulnerable and their IT staff are just as clueless. I'd have happily done anything that I could to prevent other jacknobs in the school from doing what I did, if they had just asked for my help or even just noticed there was a problem and made changes. Instead... I'm some crazy hacker kid who doesn't belong amongst the elite kids.
I remember booting a live cd once before I even had a reputation at the school, and it was as though I was beating off in church. People were so incredibly offended by the terminal and lack of gui, like I was some kind of hacker just waiting to destroy everything.
Looking back.. I wish I hadn't been such a wimpy 10th grader. I should have screwed around way more in high school. For some reason the second I was expelled and sent to the "normal" high school I grew some balls and started acting like a regular teenager.
Oh yeah the dump I speak of is called Clark Magnet and it's in La Crescenta, California.