6 ms·

When I was in high school, the “good” PCs were locked with a boot password. Only upper level cs students could use them. It was somewhat annoying to have to ge

When I was in high school, the “good” PCs were locked with a boot password. Only upper level cs students could use them. It was somewhat annoying to have to get our teacher to enter the password each time it froze etc. Partially because higher level classes were all individual study and often math classes were in progress in the same room. So it could take a while to get the teacher’s attention. So one time some classmates switched the keyboards between two computers and handed one to the teacher to enter the password. As the characters appeared in plaintext, another student typed the characters into the boot screen as fast as possible. The boot password was passed down as a secret between juniors and seniors for years.

hencq 7y ago
Hahaha, this is genius. I love the inventiveness of the low-tech keylogger here.
dmix 7y ago
The best security bypasses tends to be the simplest ones!
michaelbuckbee 7y ago
This is very similar to how MFA bypasses are done now. The user will be tricked into viewing a site that looks like the correct one to input the MFA code but it will instead be captured and relayed through an attacker controlled connection.
HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
I did something similar with the family PC a while ago- we had a wireless keyboard, and after convincing my parents to type in the password from the living room, I asked them to "log it in" from their bedroom. Notepad saved the day, and for some reason, very soon after that all the parental restrictions disappeared on my account. I still hate Vista, though.
knodi123 7y ago
In high school, I wrote a program that drew a realistic picture of our login screen, with two real inputs for username and password. No matter what you typed in those boxes, my program would save it to a text file in my home directory, and then log me out, which would instantly display the real login prompt. I didn't have any real reason to steal everyone's credentials including the teacher's, but it was fun. And I would have gotten away with it, if I wasn't storing the output in a file called stolen_passwords.txt! I got busted, and the teacher said I could either take 23 saturday detentions, or help him fix the login screen so that my attack wouldn't work anymore. I made an honest effort at the latter, and he let me off.

hencq 7y ago

Hahaha, this is genius. I love the inventiveness of the low-tech keylogger here.

dmix 7y ago

The best security bypasses tends to be the simplest ones!

michaelbuckbee 7y ago

This is very similar to how MFA bypasses are done now. The user will be tricked into viewing a site that looks like the correct one to input the MFA code but it will instead be captured and relayed through an attacker controlled connection.

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago

I did something similar with the family PC a while ago- we had a wireless keyboard, and after convincing my parents to type in the password from the living room, I asked them to "log it in" from their bedroom. Notepad saved the day, and for some reason, very soon after that all the parental restrictions disappeared on my account. I still hate Vista, though.

knodi123 7y ago

In high school, I wrote a program that drew a realistic picture of our login screen, with two real inputs for username and password. No matter what you typed in those boxes, my program would save it to a text file in my home directory, and then log me out, which would instantly display the real login prompt. I didn't have any real reason to steal everyone's credentials including the teacher's, but it was fun. And I would have gotten away with it, if I wasn't storing the output in a file called stolen_passwords.txt! I got busted, and the teacher said I could either take 23 saturday detentions, or help him fix the login screen so that my attack wouldn't work anymore. I made an honest effort at the latter, and he let me off.