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I had a very similar experience happen to me in High School in which I was expelled for hacking and changing 28 peoples transcripts. We used rainbow tables to t

I had a very similar experience happen to me in High School in which I was expelled for hacking and changing 28 peoples transcripts. We used rainbow tables to target weak NTLM hashes on library computers and exploited the fact that the local admin and domain admin password was the same giving us unlimited access to the entire districts files. We were caught because one of the people I was working with left a flash drive with his homework as well as decrypted teacher passwords in a classroom workstation. When the teacher examined the drive to ascertain its owner, they discovered their own decrypted password. Interestingly, there was absolutley zero evidence tying me to the case since I never needed to change my own grades. That didn’t matter. One students testimony was all they needed to expell me. They used the fact that on back to back calculus tests during the time in suspicion, I went from a 79% to a 95%. They didn’t consider that the tests covered 2 different chapters. It was a good life experience in hindsight however.

onemoresoop 8y ago
Do you have any regrets?
- blackflame7000 8y ago
  No, because I consider the lesson learned far more valuable than what I lost. In college, I never had the urge to cheat on anything and if I didn't do the work I simply took the F rather than copy. My pre-expulsion self would have done whatever it took to get the A. Post-expulsion I realized that what I know and what people say or think I know will never be the same. A grade is simply what one person thinks that you know. It is not the arbiter of one's knowledge, you are.
  - braythwayt 8y ago
    I used to break into the locked cabinet that held my high school’s 5MB removable hard drives (Look upon my works, and weep), but I never touched the one with our grades, I was having too much fun with the one that had a single-user BASIC implementation. It bumped available RAM to a whopping 16K, so I could develop my Super-StarTrek and Eight Queens programs. I certainly was in danger of being suspended or expelled just from the break-in, but in retrospect, my CS teacher was looking the other way. Mind you, it may have played a factor in another way. There was a Computer Science medal, it went to another student with lower grades. I was upset at the time, but in hindsight my devil-may-care attitude towards other people’s needs is a perfectly reasonable thing to take into consideration. He was probably more helpful to other students at the time, I was getting all my social credit from letting people play the game I wrote. Any ways... Sorry you were expelled, but glad we have both learned lessons that helped us become decent human beings.
Spooky23 8y ago
You’re lucky you weren’t in bigger trouble. My school called the FBI and prosecuted a kid for doing something similar.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  My high school friend was threatened with expulsion and legal action for telling the school administration about the gaping security holes in their grade and attendance systems, which he probed (with permission from a teacher) but never exploited. He offered that he could publicly announce his findings instead, and they told him they would let him off with a warning as long as he didn’t tell anyone. Then they did nothing about the vulnerabilities.
- blackflame7000 8y ago
  It would have been very hard to prove we hacked the system from within the network using the proper credentials. I doubt they could have proved much especially to the defree required tk make it worth anyones time
xvf22 8y ago
Our school hired me and a friend after the comp sci teacher found password printouts after we backdoored NetWare. We hadn't changed anything, it was more for the fun of it but we were certainly lucky he was understanding. Could have gone a lot differently.
foldr 8y ago
>there was absolutley zero evidence tying me to the case From your description it sounds like there was actually quite a significant amount of evidence (e.g. the testimony of one of the students).
- blackflame7000 8y ago
  The kid who left his flash drive and was caught red handed. He had a big incentive to downplay his role as much as possible. Didn’t work though, just caused more people to get expelled
  - foldr 8y ago
    No witness is 100% reliable, but it sounds like he was in fact telling the truth and the school came to more or less the right conclusions about who did what. People have been convicted of murder on the basis of the testimony of a single witness, so it's not that shocking to me that a similar standard of evidence suffices for expulsion.
- sfopdxnonstop 8y ago
  "BUT BUT TESTIMONY ISN'T EVIDENCE!" Republicans love to say this these days.
closeparen 8y ago
If there’s doubt about the authenticity of a grade in the computer, why not ask to see the test paper in hard copy?
- blackflame7000 8y ago
  There were actually 2 separate gradebooks we were accessing. The first was called MakingTheGrade and it was used by teachers to compute semester scores. Another program that was used by counselors and admins could access digital transcripts. To access those we needed to get the hashes from a counselor’s computer which is where the infamous flash drive originated. I never modified any of my semester or transcript grades but people who i worked with (like a counselors TA) changed theirs. I also changed transcripts for a few friends who were seniors and they actually were able to get a notorized copy of the fake transcripts before everything was uncovered and got into ucsd on appeal with the forged documents. However in case of disaster, most schools keep at least 1 years hard copy usually in some shipping container or trailer. We even considered setting fire to the hard copies but it turns out they just get replaced by the forge ones if you can get away with it long enough

onemoresoop 8y ago

Do you have any regrets?

blackflame7000 8y ago
No, because I consider the lesson learned far more valuable than what I lost. In college, I never had the urge to cheat on anything and if I didn't do the work I simply took the F rather than copy. My pre-expulsion self would have done whatever it took to get the A. Post-expulsion I realized that what I know and what people say or think I know will never be the same. A grade is simply what one person thinks that you know. It is not the arbiter of one's knowledge, you are.
- braythwayt 8y ago
  I used to break into the locked cabinet that held my high school’s 5MB removable hard drives (Look upon my works, and weep), but I never touched the one with our grades, I was having too much fun with the one that had a single-user BASIC implementation. It bumped available RAM to a whopping 16K, so I could develop my Super-StarTrek and Eight Queens programs. I certainly was in danger of being suspended or expelled just from the break-in, but in retrospect, my CS teacher was looking the other way. Mind you, it may have played a factor in another way. There was a Computer Science medal, it went to another student with lower grades. I was upset at the time, but in hindsight my devil-may-care attitude towards other people’s needs is a perfectly reasonable thing to take into consideration. He was probably more helpful to other students at the time, I was getting all my social credit from letting people play the game I wrote. Any ways... Sorry you were expelled, but glad we have both learned lessons that helped us become decent human beings.

Spooky23 8y ago

You’re lucky you weren’t in bigger trouble. My school called the FBI and prosecuted a kid for doing something similar.

jacobolus 8y ago
My high school friend was threatened with expulsion and legal action for telling the school administration about the gaping security holes in their grade and attendance systems, which he probed (with permission from a teacher) but never exploited. He offered that he could publicly announce his findings instead, and they told him they would let him off with a warning as long as he didn’t tell anyone. Then they did nothing about the vulnerabilities.
blackflame7000 8y ago
It would have been very hard to prove we hacked the system from within the network using the proper credentials. I doubt they could have proved much especially to the defree required tk make it worth anyones time

xvf22 8y ago

Our school hired me and a friend after the comp sci teacher found password printouts after we backdoored NetWare. We hadn't changed anything, it was more for the fun of it but we were certainly lucky he was understanding. Could have gone a lot differently.

foldr 8y ago

>there was absolutley zero evidence tying me to the case From your description it sounds like there was actually quite a significant amount of evidence (e.g. the testimony of one of the students).

blackflame7000 8y ago
The kid who left his flash drive and was caught red handed. He had a big incentive to downplay his role as much as possible. Didn’t work though, just caused more people to get expelled
- foldr 8y ago
  No witness is 100% reliable, but it sounds like he was in fact telling the truth and the school came to more or less the right conclusions about who did what. People have been convicted of murder on the basis of the testimony of a single witness, so it's not that shocking to me that a similar standard of evidence suffices for expulsion.
sfopdxnonstop 8y ago
"BUT BUT TESTIMONY ISN'T EVIDENCE!" Republicans love to say this these days.

closeparen 8y ago

If there’s doubt about the authenticity of a grade in the computer, why not ask to see the test paper in hard copy?

blackflame7000 8y ago
There were actually 2 separate gradebooks we were accessing. The first was called MakingTheGrade and it was used by teachers to compute semester scores. Another program that was used by counselors and admins could access digital transcripts. To access those we needed to get the hashes from a counselor’s computer which is where the infamous flash drive originated. I never modified any of my semester or transcript grades but people who i worked with (like a counselors TA) changed theirs. I also changed transcripts for a few friends who were seniors and they actually were able to get a notorized copy of the fake transcripts before everything was uncovered and got into ucsd on appeal with the forged documents. However in case of disaster, most schools keep at least 1 years hard copy usually in some shipping container or trailer. We even considered setting fire to the hard copies but it turns out they just get replaced by the forge ones if you can get away with it long enough