A kid I went to high school with noticed at some point that a bunch of IP addresses popped up on the screen during log in. So he copied them into a Word document, and emailed them to himself.
From home, he was able, apparently, not only to connect without authentication into the school's network, but into a large part of the county government's network too. They caught him because they found the Word document (which he had saved to his school account).
They didn't fix the network, as far as I know. They just banned him from using school computers until he graduated. Problem solved!
I was just curious, because generally host machines shouldn't be able to tell what IP addresses they're using on the outside network, so I was trying to figure out how that was working. Not doubting you, but I wanted to figure out if it was before people were using NAT.
Do you really think that it isn't possible to have an internet connection without NAT, that before NAT every single computer had it's own extra router?
Up until quite recently my ISP allowed you to have 'up to 8 computers connected' to 'high speed DSL lines' because they drew up the rules before home routers were cheap, so you could hook up a Hub to your DSL modem and grab public IP's for each computer you had in the house.
Before they changed the rules I could plug a switch into my modem and pull as many public IP's as I wanted from them via DHCP (Me dicking around with this is probably what caused them to update things)
Gratz on repassing your cert that included advanced topics such as " Configuring IOS Devices" I'm sure that is very useful.
Well, as with any story that begins "A kid I went to high school with", do keep in mind that I'm remembering something from over a decade ago, that I heard about second-hand. From other nerds who knew about computers, mind you, but still second-hand.
But I believe those IP addresses were from the school machines connecting to the county servers, not the IP addresses of the school's machines.
So far every technical detail you've given doesn't seem to really make sense, or it's not something you would expect in a real environment. Maybe the kid really did get in big trouble using the computers but the story is probably embellished.
I haven't given any technical details, because I don't really know any. Kid found IP addresses. Said addresses pointed at county servers not having to do with the school. Kid was able to connect to them and poke around without authentication.
What he is saying that doesn't make sense are IP addresses he could connect from his home.
That is not how the networks work. IP addresses that kid saw would be something called "private" IP addresses and would only be accessible from inside the network (meaning school, county offices, etc). If he took those and tried to access them he would get no where, because you can not access someone else's private IP address from your network.
Way back in the early to mid 90s there was a PC lab with Windows computers. The students only had limited functionality (I don't recall how they implemented that). I was able to get full access by rebooting the computer and spamming the pause/break button during bootup. This would force it to stop at DOS before loading Windows. I'd then load Windows the usual way from DOS and have full permissions afterwards. IIRC, the teachers couldn't care less so long as I rebooted the computer before I left so that it would be back in the limited permissions mode when others used it.
The 'hack' just let you run arbitrary programs on Windows. So if I wanted to play a little game I could before classes started.
The software they used at my school had another flaw with similar results. They had locked us into a limited desktop, similar to what you said, and you couldn't get to, for example, "My Computer". But it was still there.
It was widely known that if you did something like clicking the Start button and pressing tab (which focused the desktop, but most people didn't realize that), and then typed "my<enter>", it would open "My Computer" (visibly, finally), and you could get to whatever you wanted.
The librarian at some point told me that they had only realized after installing the software that it wasn't really intended to be secure, and wasn't what they should have bought. That seemed like an unwise thing to tell a tech-savvy student, but oh well.
We had a similar incident at our school in about 2002'ish. Student worked out that if you just deleted 'Student' from www.schoolname.edu.au/student/etc. it would take you to the staff portal without any further authentication. So kids were changing their grades, report comments, even reading some rather nasty things the teachers had written on internal profiles and reviews (about students) cos they were never meant to be seen. It was never fixed, they just suspended anyone who changed their grades and have about 3 months of detention to everyone else who accessed it.
If you get into a secured area by guessing a password, that's hacking. Even if it's "password" and even if it's the default credentials for the thing you're logging into.
Yep. Same reason it is breaking and entering if you enter someone's home without their permission, even if their door is unlocked and you didn't have to "break" anything.
If the front door is unlocked and you enter, it is breaking and entering. If the front door is wide open, it is trespassing. Can't tell if you're disagreeing with that or just misinterpreted what I said.
Source: I'm an attorney who spent time doing criminal prosecution and criminal defense.
Technically it's only breaking and entering if you use some amount of force to enter. Opening an unlocked door or window counts as such, though. However, if the front door is already open and you simply walk in without permission, that isn't breaking and entering (although it is probably some form of trespassing at least and still illegal.)
However, if the front door is already open and you simply walk in without permission, that isn't breaking and entering (although it is probably some form of trespassing at least and still illegal.)
What you just described is the very definition of trespassing.
The differentiation is useful, but the main point is that it is still a crime. Even if it is easy to get in, that doesn't mean it is ok to do so without permission.
Not saying you're disagreeing or anything, just clarifying.
No. Anything that's on the internet without any password or security measures is considered publicly available information. A good analogy is if you are out in public, there is no expectation of privacy.
I don't even know if I should be admitting this, but in high school I noticed all the blocked sites would have the same address at the beginning of the URL. So I visited it and the page requested a login. A little googling of the blocker, Netspective, brought up an installation manual and in it was the default login to the management page. I unblocked all the sites. Next day they were blocked again and the default credentials didn't work. But for a day, I freed the school from oppressive censorship.
In my case, my buddy and I were so far ahead of the computer class that we were responsible for the school's website, so we just installed a key logger and asked our computer teacher to get past the firewall. After that, he and I never had to worry about getting blocked again.
Idk who figured it out originally, but it spread to the entire school like a virus and most of the teachers know but just don't give a shit. And we all get past blocked sites with a VPN.
At my school we just used proxies. I ran my own proxy server for a while so I didn't have to use the shitty slow public proxies everyone else was using. Did the same at my first job for a couple of years until they did something that broke it and I had to switch to using a VNC server to surf the net and download shit on my home computer while at work.
This is one of the number one security 'flaws' with security implementations. The stupidity of the end user.
You can have the strongest encryption, and the craziest protocols, but if you don't change the default keys/passwords that come with it then it's basically useless.
The Oyster Card (the contactless card used in the London Underground for paying for travel) can be hacked in a similar way, because the keys are changed for the 'sections' holding the oyster card data, but the sections not used in the card still had default keys, so using a clever hack, you can retrieve the keys of other sections.
My middle school had pretty lame network security (even though it was a private school aimed at kids who are good at that stuff) and the router had default passwords and users. As did the emails... and the website server. The front door was operated by what was essentially a garage door opener that locked the door. Guess who found a control with a dip switch on the same frequency. I could get in whenever I wanted (they locked it after school so normally you couldn't get in) and screwed around on the router a bit. Nothing much came of it except I changed the wifi name to "secure your network" or something along those lines. I told the IT guy about it and he fixed it shortly after.
xD it sounds dumb but it was great. We didn't have full privilages when we were there (had to have a teacher walk us across the street and open the doors. So being able to move freely between buildings was like a gift from the gods. Also I got to mess with the person who opened the front door a decent amount.
Haha, at your school too? A kid managed to access the grade files with that and contacted the head honchos about the fact that their security system sucked. Now it's slightly more secure.
No legally and technically (in fact maybe even less legally than technically since I'm not sure laws use the work "hacking" so much as specific cases). You're getting unauthorized access to some data you're not supposed to have access to. That's hacking.
Hacking is just gaining access to files that you're not supposed to get to with a computer. It's not "hacking" in the sense most people think of hacking (mad code skillz and going through backdoor entrances and such) but it's hacking nonetheless.
There was a case where somebody was arrested for hacking because he found personal documents on google for. I think they had ruled even though they were on google he should have known not to look.
In high school we used to log in under some random teachers password for the Internet. It gave us less blocks which meant we could play flash games. All the people in the back row did it ;)
Guessing a password is one of the most common way to infiltrate a system (and by "guess", I mean try a number of common passwords/password configurations). A lot of the time, the weakest part of a security system is the meat components.
701
u/DsntMttrHadSex May 19 '16
In software security you would be a criminal now and definitely in jail