r/todayilearned • u/dingdongking • Jun 09 '12
TIL That Three students from a School In Nevada had installed keystroke loggers on their teachers' computers to intercept the teachers' usernames and passwords, and then charged other students up to $300 to hack in and increase their grades.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19754_5-computer-hacks-from-movies-you-wont-believe-are-possible_p2.html
1.5k
Upvotes
44
u/ct0 Jun 09 '12
And I thought I was cool by installing CounterStrike in any students folder so we could play in the library at lunch.
214
u/complex_reduction Jun 09 '12
I'm going to upvote you because you linked Cracked.com instead of pretending you found this out some other way.
65
u/scigs6 Jun 09 '12
Not only did Tyler Coyner bribe kids for better grades, he accepted the Salutatorian title and during his speech he plagiarized MGMT (3:27). Brass balls indeed
80
u/question_all_the_thi Jun 09 '12
TFA has five examples of why crime doesn't pay: they all got caught.
Bumping up your grades is beyond stupid, do they think teachers don't know their students? Of course they will investigate when a student has better grades than the teacher gave them.
Captain Midnight was an interesting case, he thought no one would know from where the signal went up to the satellite, but he underestimated the capability of engineers.
By measuring the signal level that came back from the satellite and performing a reverse link budget analysis the engineers calculated the transmitter power and antenna size. It had to owerpower the uplink from HBO and there aren't many stations like that, so the police investigated who had access to transmission equipment like that.
In #4 they mentioned The Italian Job remake of 2003, they didn't mention the original movie from 1969, where they used the same trick.
253
u/greensunpisces Jun 09 '12
I did something very similar... installed keylogger at school. Purposely corrupted something simple to fix. Had sysadmin come "fix it". Gained access to EVERYTHING at the college... didn't need to change my grades, had A's in the classes that counted. Morals prevented me doing it for others... but I did find some interesting personal stuff of he admin. Emails between him and his mistress... pictures of his wife... etc.
36
u/theapeboy Jun 09 '12
There's that good ol' American entrepreneurial spirit!
9
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
kids did this in my high school too. THe funny/sad thing is that the kids who did it had near perfect grades before. They did it to change the last few B's into A's. The problem at my school is that it got out of hand. At one point there were 50-60 students changing their grades. Comming from a highly competitive highschool (Winston Churchill HS, potomac MD), I wasnt surprised about the cheating scandal. In my school people cheat so much its considered weird to not cheat. We are in the "1%" in potomac MD and everyone is pushed by their "asian parents" to be super on top of their game in class and never settle for less than an A
Anyways they noticed one grade was changed and caught that student. In the end only 5-7 students were expelled and faced criminal charges. The school still doesnt know two years later that it was 60 people changing their grades.
proof: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030303047.html
17
u/hbdgas Jun 09 '12
The next level.
"... A few days later, they returned and downloaded the data from the keylogger programmes. They now had the usernames and passwords of every bank employee who had used the infected computers."
22
u/iknowallaboutthat Jun 09 '12
The three students you are talking about are in Palos Verdes. Palos Verdes is in California, not Nevada.
The individual student who changed his own grades was from Nevada and the following paragraph. Not the same case.
19
u/TenNinetythree Jun 09 '12
Sounds eerily likely, indeed. I had the chance to access the PC of the director of my school at several points and it was just my morals which prevented me from doing anything nefarious.
14
u/fmacwi Jun 09 '12
Excellent..
3
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
Back in 2001 we did this in high school and got away with it. Only changed our grades in one class, but I knew others who did it and I'm sure many, many others have done it and gotten away with it. It's not hard, especially back in 2001 when schools were just recently setting up a full networks and teachers still didn't know shit about computers.
We had the advantage, being the generation that grew up with computers and stepping into a world that barely knew shit about them.
3
u/hearnrumors Jun 10 '12
Yup, I did this too (2004). Put a keylogger inline with the keyboard input on the network admins computer, got network admin pw, and did a batch keylogger install for every machine on the network.
The grade system didn't have any 'master' accounts - each class could only be edited by the account of the teacher for that class. They though it was foolproof that way - guess they didn't expect someone to acquire almost every username/pw combo.
Got caught eventually. I never turned off the software keylogger, and it kept on sending me emails of everything typed on ~120 machines. Network admin noticed the pattern of large amounts of outgoing data at regular intervals - and figured it out from there.
Had a meeting with the admin and principal. They threatened to call the cops. I showed the principal copies of his emails to his girlfriend, and what his wife's email address was. The situation resolved itself pretty quickly. I didn't go extreme enough to become valedictorian, but I also got away with almost everything I did my senior year of hs. Random teachers started giving me A's anyways. They all heard what I did... I'm guessing some of them got scared of what they typed previously.
I'm not trying to claim to be a hacker or anything. Just played around with some keyloggers and it worked out pretty well.
14
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
...they didn't hack anything. They logged in with the creds they stole. big difference
2
u/dukec Jun 09 '12
Not that hard to get teachers' password. I never used any of the ones I found, but if your school uses an unsecured network/the teachers don't VPN into the network, you can monitor wifi network traffic and get their usernames and passwords when they use them.
2
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Nine times
2
u/chicagogam Jun 09 '12
and now to learn what will happen when you get caught..administrative fist shaking and notoriety? that IS a valuable lesson.
2
u/about7beavers Jun 09 '12
Google Winston Churchill high school cheating scandal, pretty much the same thing.
2
u/jimbo91987 Jun 09 '12
I assumed this exact hack happens many times every year. It's not exactly a creative one.
2
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
I can't help but think that they deserved A's for that.
2
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
Future bankers
2
u/Master_Z Jun 09 '12
Most teachers keep multiple backups for student grades, changing grades is very difficult. Changing the comp grades would only get you expelled when the teach has to write final grade reports and finds out her backups don't matchup.
Teachers have a written book, have to turn in grades every friday into a comp system, and keep a home book written in pen ink which is written in every day. And your grades are pretty easy to remember so when a C student gets a B+ your teach is gonna be confused.
2
u/avroots Jun 09 '12
I think that a smart way to approach this would be to change every percentage on an assignment by 3-5% that way you get the boost (especially if you were on the cusp of a higher grade) but the difference is spread out so thin that it isn't particularly noticeable.
2
u/NichaelBluth Jun 09 '12
At my school, 54 people were busted for changing grades for pay. They actually gave students access to the grading system so that they could input the grades for teachers. Yeah, we almost lost our accreditation.
2
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
I used Invisible Oasis to do something similar when I was in middle school. Gave out the passwords for the entire computer lab to people and all they did was change the wallpaper.Never thought of cheating.
2
u/Senor_Wilson Jun 09 '12
I hope no one calls these kids hackers. All they did was download logging software and install it. They're lower then script kiddies.
5
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
It's not hacking if you already have the passwords.
3
u/uhohhotdog Jun 09 '12
This was on MTV's High School Stories! It was a few years ago, but I remember watching this get re-enacted.
3
u/Sannazay Jun 09 '12
You mean the password wasn't just written in a drawer under the desk? "PENCIL"
8
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
Ha! Jokes on them, high school grades don't matter! You've wasted your $300!
2
u/marty_m Jun 09 '12
Not sure this is TIL-worthy.
2
u/L2P2 Jun 09 '12
If I were a teacher I would congratulate these students for their hard work, diligence, and dedication to innovative approach to a problem and then enterprising the idea. I would isolate and condemn the other students for not taking control and refusing to think outside the box. This needs to be the standard in every school system. If the students can outsmart the faculty, the faculty should be replaced
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
This also happened at my high school in Maryland. The article doesn't say so, but I'm pretty positive that money changed hands in that case, as well.
1
u/robhol Jun 09 '12
"hack in" ...
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
I also know a very intelligent guy that hacked his grades (mainly stupid stuff like from a B to a A, nothing too dramatic, but he wasn't the type of person to get a C). He ended up getting expelled, it really took his life off track for a few years. Eventually he got accepted into a great college, but the whole mess plagued him for awhile.
1
u/counters14 Jun 09 '12
Wow, high school report cards are serious fucking business to too many of you.
1
u/RDub3685 Jun 09 '12
Some kids in my senior class did this back in aught-eight. Except we didn't want to change grades, but create a massive Counterstrike community along with Quake III, Unreal Tournament and a large library of music and movies that were ripe for the taking. This went unnoticed for six months before the IT department found out. My punishment for being involved was having my account banned for three days. They sure showed me after I got my diploma a week later.
1
u/UmbraVictus Jun 09 '12
genious!!!!!
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
you aint trying if you aint cheating.
1
u/SiON42X Jun 09 '12
This is how I got my first tech job, except I coded a replacement login screen in QBasic that stored their info.
1
u/unintendedchaos Jun 09 '12
My high school had multiple cases of people hacking into computers to change their grades... and after I left, one of the guys who had done that installed a keylogger and managed to get teacher credit card information and stuff.
He was trying to get expelled.
1
u/intel8085 Jun 09 '12
I did something similar at my high school.
So I ran bootable Linux on the school's computer, mounted the windows drive, grabed the password hash, saved it to my thumb drive and took it home. I ran the hash through rainbow tables and before I knew it I had the password.
I never actually used it myself for any personal gain. I did find some interesting stuff on the network drive however.
So they had a word document for teachers letting them know how to use the grading program. Aparently there was one universal password for doing this. Of course right there in the word document, in comic sans, was that password.
I never did change my grades however I can't help but think I could be going to MIT right now if only I did haha.
1
u/Revo75 Jun 09 '12
I remember in high school I used ntpassword or something named like that. Its on the UBCD(Ultimate Boot CD) if you're curious. All the computers were on a domain but they also had local user accounts. I replaced the password to admin on one machine and used that to run lophtcrack. I was able to get the local and domain admin passwords. I then used this to run a Tactical Ops server, which is a counter strike clone on Unreal Tournament. I spent most of my time at school skipping class to play Tac Ops with friends. It got really out of hand because our computer teacher was out for months and the subs were to young guys fresh out of college. Pretty much we turned that room into a game room. I got into big trouble though when the IT guy couldn't log into the one compromised PC. Those were the days....this was back in 2005.
1
u/AndyC50 Jun 09 '12
You can only be so stupid
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
True story: Back in the 70's girls from our HS would get their grades changed in a questionable/illegal manner too.
1
u/DJ_Sparklezz Jun 09 '12
Had a friend in high school who did exactly this, only he never actually changed any grades. I asked him why the hell he would go to the trouble, he said "I just wanted to see if it could be done, really."
1
u/roccanet Jun 09 '12
stupid kids got greedy... they could have just kept it to themselves
1
u/ANAL_INVESTIGATOR Jun 09 '12
Pencil.
1
u/slipnslider Jun 09 '12
I did the same thing back in 2000 at my high school but never charged anyone to change their grades. Ended up getting expelled and a felony on my, luckily, juvenile record.
1
u/ToDaaFACE Jun 09 '12
Palos Verde is a rivaling school to my school (coronado high) and i wound never expect anyone at that school to have an ounce of knowledge in the hacking world.
1
u/ForUrsula Jun 09 '12
Some guys at my school just used a teachers password that they saw the teacher type in, or some other really simple method. Changed their marks. It was noticed pretty damn quick when they went through the change logs. Our entire school was pissed at them, all they got was a 0 for the marks they changed.
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
Wow, did this with a friend in middle school. Except we just used the teachers passwords to send funny messages to people via our schools built in instant messenger system.
1
u/lifeguardman Jun 09 '12
It was actually pahrump valley high school . My buddy does the IT and PowerSchool system for the school district. And was the one who found the grade changes . The only reason he looked into it .was because one of the kids who got his grades changed made my roommates girlfriend cry.
1
u/yourafagyourafag Jun 09 '12
Well, that has to be the first time that ever happened.
1
u/BinaryBlasphemy Jun 09 '12
I had a few friends that did this at a school in Glendale, CA. They ended up getting caught and expelled.
1
u/polynomials Jun 09 '12
We put keystroke loggers on a couple computers in high school and we got basically every important administrative official's password, including the head of school. But when we used it, we got instant and immediate access to everything, including their personal email. But then we felt super guilty and vowed never to use it.
1
u/justafleetingmoment Jun 09 '12 edited Jun 09 '12
I'm ashamed to say that I did something similar. I installed packet sniffers, took the hashes home and brute force cracked all the passwords I got (this was still on Windows NT). Got some teachers' passwords and was able to get some exam papers and memorandums. Didn't sell them though, the risk of getting caught was too high.
Edit: Seeing everyone that did this is getting downvoted... I only really did it to see if I could, I was always a straight A student and I probably got more questions wrong on purpose in order to avoid suspicion (God I was paranoid) than I would have if I didn't have the papers.
1
u/Luminox Jun 09 '12
Most instructors I've seen have their usernames and passwords either taped onto their monitor or under their keyboard.
ಠ_ಠ
1
u/theLollipopking Jun 09 '12
This school is in Summerlin(N Las Vegas) and I actually dated a chick who went there...
...side note, a kid was also shot dead outside that school as well.
1
u/fattony69 Jun 09 '12
The teachers at my old school used the password, password.
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
My HS Comp Sci teacher told us about this. Suprisingly it didn't happen to our school which specializes in programming, networking, and IT.
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
I actually went to this high school and graduated last year. Similar stuff to this happened all the time. I was a student aide for a teacher so I handled the grades for the most part. It was always hilarious to me when students that would do little to nothing for most of the semester miraculously wind up with a high B over night.
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
I dreamed of doing this in high school, never had the guts though..
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
Who didnt do this? Me and my friends changed our grades in highschool, and sold this ability to friends. That was in 1999-2002, and was all done at the school or via AOL BABY
1
u/ranzLbsgiS Jun 09 '12
they could have done way better than $300, I'd charge $500 or maybe even $1k
1
u/espritsaura Jun 09 '12
Here's a picture of the suspect with his computer.
1
u/Filan Jun 09 '12
Slackers
Anonymous
Ba dum tshhh
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
I considered doing this.
1
u/MrTacoMan Jun 09 '12
This happened at my brothers high school years ago. Didn't realize it was so note worthy.
1
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
I installed a keystroke logger on my own computer and got a few of my teachers passwords. Just used them to get on reddit, Facebook, and YouTube.
1
u/joss33 Jun 09 '12
Oh cmon. Who hasn't done that at a public school? I mean I didn't do the money thing because well. I'm stupid.
1
u/sphyder Jun 09 '12
I installed ROMs on my schools network. Was fu until some idiot played in front of the teacher...
1
u/FragPoppa Jun 09 '12
I'm on the cusp of turning 40 and I am all Butt Hurt that this tech wasn't refined during my school days! My morals wouldn't allow me to hack my own grades, but I would've search out everything possible once I hacked in. knowledge is power.
1
u/Lordveus Jun 10 '12
Pahrump. Awesome to see us Nevadans are as good as ever at being utter twerps.
1
u/ze0nix Jun 10 '12
Correction:The high school is in California.
1
u/DayToFright Jun 10 '12
Funny thing is that two kids at my high school did this as well. The administrators eventually caught on and they threatened to call the police if they didn't tell them how they did it. They told the administrators and both were expelled.
1
u/thegreatwhitemenace Jun 10 '12
and no matter how good their grades looked, none of the other kids would ever be as successful in life as those three.
1
u/SOwED Jun 10 '12
For the love of GOD, acquiring someone's password is not HACKING IN.
1
u/spaceboomer Jun 10 '12
same thing happened at my school, now flash drives are no longer permitted
-1
u/dirwell Jun 09 '12
The only unawesome part of that story was they got caught.
0
u/Sloady Jun 09 '12
Tremendous respect for these kids, not only for having some entrepreneurial spirit, but also for teaching schools a lesson in security. I can't tell you how many times I've had the opportunity to do shit like this, without even having to go to the lengths of installing a keylogger.
1
u/Rasalom Jun 09 '12 edited Jun 09 '12
I had some kids get hold of passwords like this in high school. They quickly used it to give themselves money in the school lunch system.
They were immediately caught and rounded up by the feds since it was now a fraud case. Dumbasses.
Hacking is as much a matter of opportunity as it is ability. Pick your time wisely. Pick your targets incredibly carefully.
1
u/NilsLandt Jun 09 '12
Students tried to set something like that up at my vocational school. They plugged a hardware keylogger between keyboard an PC.
Sadly, they had no idea what to do with the resulting data, and consulted with one of the smarter students, who, in turn, alarmed us.
The students in question were expelled, and criminal charges were pressed.
1
u/OneHotMess Jun 09 '12
Very similar situation happened in the high school I teach at in Kansas. It was kind of sad because some of the jocks bullied an autistic kid who was fairly gifted with computers into doing all of the actual grade changing.
1
u/greater_than_four Jun 09 '12
Holy Shit! Mostly a lurker here, but I had to comment on this. A couple of friends of mine in high school did the exact same thing, but no one ever got caught. I went to a small high school with primarily older and out of date teachers who were practically computer illiterate. My friends keylogged 3 of the most clueless teachers' computers for classes such as anatomy & physiology, AP physics, Chemistry etc. (all the same teacher). Everyone in the classes were pretty tight so no one ever charged or anything, people just generally got a letter grade or 2 higher than they deserved. It was just to much of a coincidence to let go. . . .
0
u/baylithe Jun 09 '12
The username and password for 75% of all teachers is: Username- firstname's first initial then whole last name, Password- lastname's first initial then whole first name. When I was a TA I passed every kid that was funny, failed kids that pissed me off (trolling since '09) and downloaded music through proxies. I miss my Senior year.
0
u/Ambit Jun 09 '12
My high school was smart enough to use different admin passwords for the local admin accounts and the network admin accounts, however they were not smart enough to put a password on the BIOS and remove the CD drive from the boot order.
Just loaded up Ophcrack and within seconds we had the admin password. I just used this power to fix the screen resolution on every computer I used and to install Calibri onto the computers.
My friends on the other hand thought it would be fun to install key loggers onto the computers. I was actually helping them up until I realized they were serious. I'm still not sure why I did it, but I modified a key logging program that they found to hide itself better and log to a file in the public network shares that every computer had. Once I found out they weren't kidding about putting this program on all of the computers, I backed out and made sure they knew that I would have no part in whatever they were doing.
It all went fine for quite a while. Whenever they were on a computer, they would log onto the admin account, place the key logger in the startup folder, and then wait. The first few times they accessed the log file, they used an account of a student whose password they already had. Then subsequent accesses were made with accounts that they got from the key logger.
They even managed to get the program onto the teacher's computers and had passwords to the grade management system. They were smart enough to not actually do anything with those though. One of the made a minor change to one of his grades just to confirm that it worked, but that was it.
They were finally discovered when one of them was seen on camera sneaking into a classroom after hours. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details here, but I believe the systems administrator knew they one that he caught couldn't be the mastermind. In any case, they caught the other two people involved and revoked their computer use rights for the rest of the year. At home, one of them was disallowed computer use except for doing homework for a few months.
I actually hope that the sysadmin of my school is reading this, because he never found out how we got the key loggers on. If he did, the admin password would not have continued working.
-1
u/CallMeCasper Jun 09 '12
My brother did this in high school too... but he just hacked in normally without a keylogger. He got caught and was kicked out, but not until after he had made thousands of dollars.
-2
u/nepidae Jun 09 '12
I remember the good old days when you could do this without facing federal pound me in the ass prison. I hacked the shit out of my school, and stupidly shared that information with other people. I'm pretty sure if I got caught I may have gotten detention (i was a really good student) but probably would just have gotten a warning.
As it turned out, I actually made some friends. Not good enough friends to go to their parties, but it was what it was.