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I had sysadmin rights on my school’s Windows servers after some very simple social engineering (for a 10 year old). The real irony was that I was called to the

I had sysadmin rights on my school’s Windows servers after some very simple social engineering (for a 10 year old). The real irony was that I was called to the principal’s office on multiple occasions because I seemed to be able to fix things on the network that the local “admin” (e.g. music teacher) couldn’t. Fun times indeed. It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. Which in retrospect has been the most valuable outcome from being the local “that kid from Wargames”

RotaryTelephone 5y ago
Had a similar problem with feeling betrayed by authority figures when I was called in to be questioned about a hacking incident while in middle school just because I was good at VB in programming glass. Can really ruin a kid's confidence for years to come in case anyone in such position is reading this now.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  Same thing happened to my friend in high school, there was someone causing some mischief with some of the school computers, and just because he was into BBSs and computers, he was a big suspect, but he was a good talker and was able to avoid any punishment. He was a good friend because he kept silent about the fact that I was the one doing it ;)
- nefitty 5y ago
  I can point to several false accusations I suffered as an elementary school student that made me deeply skeptical and wary of authority. "Even if I color in the lines, or intentionally dabble in creative thinking, some adult might yell at me... Hm. I don't need their permissions. They obviously don't see how great I am so they are a dumb nuisance."
908B64B197 5y ago
> It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. It sounds like they were right to trust you? Doesn't sound like you ever did anything bad with admin credentials. And you even used it to fix stuff.
- LocalH 5y ago
  My reading is that they weren't called to the principal's office to fix things, but after the fact and in a disciplinatory fashion.
  - conradludgate 5y ago
    I read the opposite, but it's still meaningful. A sysadmin who can't do his job and has to defer to a kid is embarrassing and at that point how can you trust the "authority" to know what they are doing.
jpmoral 5y ago
>It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. It looks like they realised they were out of their depth and found someone who could help. Were they wrong to trust you? Edit: I may have misunderstood your post. Did you mean: A. The principal and the music teacher asked you to help out a few times because they knew you were skilled B. You were always the first suspect when anything went wrong I understood it as A. If so I really don't see how you'd lose respect for them over that.
- LocalH 5y ago
  It sounds like they weren't called to the principal's office to fix things, but after the fact and in a disciplinatory fashion.
- pdpi 5y ago
  There's the educational, constructive "Hey lokimedes I hear you're pretty good with this computer stuff want to come and help me while I solve a problem?", then there's the not so educational and not so constructive "Hey lokimedes, I hear you're pretty good at this, want to solve this problem for us?". The "admin" person calling you for the former? Pretty cool. The principal calling you to their office for the latter? It really does say weird things about authority figures to a kid who's paying attention, especially when mixed with the cluelessness about security.
  - Sophira 5y ago
    It's not just the words though, here. Being called to the principal's office is an exceptional occasion. If they were called to the office that many times, they'd see through the words and recognise that the adults were out of their depth and that's why they were being called.
rootsudo 5y ago
Public network shares, cain&abel, learning about NTLM downgrading and well, these were the days when Wifi was "new" and wireless B and G was considered wow, 54mbps. Back then, everything really felt like magic. Old netsend trick, pre windows xp SP2. There were enough stories at this time online that I knew it was best to say nothing. Did nothing bad, just explored, learned quite a few things and well was surprised how really easy it was to do things. Nowadays, I feel kids won't/don't get that chance to explore - which is sad. Internet is curated through apps and "enagement" user experience and cloud services/SAAS. Maybe they can spot a lifetime link to a google sheets master password document. ;)
- bikingbismuth 5y ago
  Netsend made me feel like a true spooky wizard. It bums me out to see how much of our computing has moved north-south.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Teknoman117 5y ago
I was in high school from 2007 to 2011. Half of it in rural Alabama, the other half in the Bay. Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school administration's views on technology and information access were so backwards. Our school basically didn't allow accessing any websites that weren't on some allowlist. Teachers had accounts to bypass the content filter. We had a game design class that happened after school. Usually that period was reserved for making up classes you failed, but ROP courses that didn't align with the district's curriculum goals were taught as well. Needless to say, pretty much every resource we needed was blocked. So the teacher would give out his content filter bypass credentials, because the school wouldn't entertain any exceptions to students not being allowed to have them even though they knew there were classes on campus that would have tremendous difficulty. A couple of times a student would leak the credentials to others on campus and it'd take all of 5 minutes to get to everyone on campus via social media. They'd always treat everyone who knew the bypass accounts as "guilty unless proven otherwise". I ended up in detention a few times for even knowing it. Parents complained to the school a bunch, school just always blanket said "bypassing the content filter as a student is against policy for any reason. No exceptions." Makes me think back to 1st grade in 1999 when I was first given internet access and being told not to use Google because "it wasn't safe". Couldn't have been that bad because it took another half decade for me to inadvertently end up on the "adult" part of the internet.
- riversflow 5y ago
  Similar time period, I used portable Firefox and then Chrome on a thumb drive to bypass our content filter. I actually find this surprising in retrospect, but I'd guess they were using Content Advisor on Internet Explorer[1]. I carefully guarded my secret. [1] this pdf appears to lend credence to that idea(no affiliation). https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_HomeUsers.pdf https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_Home...
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    If I were smarter, I probably would have learned about proxy servers. I was tantalizingly close as is. I had set up port forwarding on our home router and a dyndns account to access my (Linux) desktop via ssh. I'm almost surprised it took me another few years to bump into SOCKS proxies. I already had 99% of the setup, just not the final step. Oh well I guess. Our school was Windows land as well. They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP (they had never adopted Vista, and 7 was still "too new"). Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops. There was also that time I got detention for riding my bike in the school parking lot. Which was dumb, because I always showed up 30+ minutes before any cars did because I made a deal with the sculpting teacher that I wouldn't have to do sculpting if I showed up early to class and learned about the chemistry of clay glazes along with helping him mix them for class, which was honestly far more interesting to me. Our AP Chemistry teacher was a nuclear engineering postdoc from MIT who spent her entire career helping clean up after US military nuclear accidents. High school was a weird time. It just boggles my mind still to this day to have a school staffed by some wonderfully brilliant teachers and have an administration that seemed to lived in fear of a student body who dared learn something or learn from someone they didn't approve of.
kingcharles 5y ago
When I was 11 I social engineered the son of the computing teacher to get all the admin passwords. Then I fucked around with a whole bunch of stuff and showed a friend. When they figured out it'd been hacked they weren't sure who did it, but my buddy broke down very quickly and let them know lol. I was banned from the computer lab for the whole of my secondary school years. It didn't matter though, because when I was 12 (~1989) the headmaster dropped computing from the school curriculum as "computers are a passing fad". They just used the computers for typing up essays after that.
- Anthony-G 5y ago
  > Computers are a passing fad. That reminds me of the Decca record label executives rejecting the Beatles in 1962 because “guitar groups are on the way out”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_Decca_audition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_Decca_audition
- cbozeman 5y ago
  It's hard not to be critical of this headmaster, but I do have to question both the intelligence and the wisdom of someone who, in 1989, could not clearly see computers had no chance of becoming a "passing fad". Picking up a copy of The Wall Street Journal at any point in the previous ten years could have clearly indicated that... and any school at which there's a "headmaster"... I would expect the WSJ is not a foreign entity to them.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    The fact the parents allowed it to go through, in hindsight, is absurd. The computing teacher did try to teach us outside of school hours some times, but I failed the Computing GCSE (F grade), which is hilarious as at the exact same time I was being offered a job at Argonaut Games after Jez San tried out my 3D engine.
conradev 5y ago
I found the password to my teacher's eBoard[1] in 4th grade (a five digit code) and started changing things as a practical joke. Then I started seeing more five digit codes just written on Post-it notes… [1] https://www.eboard.com https://www.eboard.com

RotaryTelephone 5y ago

Had a similar problem with feeling betrayed by authority figures when I was called in to be questioned about a hacking incident while in middle school just because I was good at VB in programming glass. Can really ruin a kid's confidence for years to come in case anyone in such position is reading this now.

gilbetron 5y ago
Same thing happened to my friend in high school, there was someone causing some mischief with some of the school computers, and just because he was into BBSs and computers, he was a big suspect, but he was a good talker and was able to avoid any punishment. He was a good friend because he kept silent about the fact that I was the one doing it ;)
nefitty 5y ago
I can point to several false accusations I suffered as an elementary school student that made me deeply skeptical and wary of authority. "Even if I color in the lines, or intentionally dabble in creative thinking, some adult might yell at me... Hm. I don't need their permissions. They obviously don't see how great I am so they are a dumb nuisance."

908B64B197 5y ago

> It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. It sounds like they were right to trust you? Doesn't sound like you ever did anything bad with admin credentials. And you even used it to fix stuff.

LocalH 5y ago
My reading is that they weren't called to the principal's office to fix things, but after the fact and in a disciplinatory fashion.
- conradludgate 5y ago
  I read the opposite, but it's still meaningful. A sysadmin who can't do his job and has to defer to a kid is embarrassing and at that point how can you trust the "authority" to know what they are doing.

jpmoral 5y ago

>It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. It looks like they realised they were out of their depth and found someone who could help. Were they wrong to trust you? Edit: I may have misunderstood your post. Did you mean: A. The principal and the music teacher asked you to help out a few times because they knew you were skilled B. You were always the first suspect when anything went wrong I understood it as A. If so I really don't see how you'd lose respect for them over that.

LocalH 5y ago
It sounds like they weren't called to the principal's office to fix things, but after the fact and in a disciplinatory fashion.
pdpi 5y ago
There's the educational, constructive "Hey lokimedes I hear you're pretty good with this computer stuff want to come and help me while I solve a problem?", then there's the not so educational and not so constructive "Hey lokimedes, I hear you're pretty good at this, want to solve this problem for us?". The "admin" person calling you for the former? Pretty cool. The principal calling you to their office for the latter? It really does say weird things about authority figures to a kid who's paying attention, especially when mixed with the cluelessness about security.
- Sophira 5y ago
  It's not just the words though, here. Being called to the principal's office is an exceptional occasion. If they were called to the office that many times, they'd see through the words and recognise that the adults were out of their depth and that's why they were being called.

rootsudo 5y ago

Public network shares, cain&abel, learning about NTLM downgrading and well, these were the days when Wifi was "new" and wireless B and G was considered wow, 54mbps. Back then, everything really felt like magic. Old netsend trick, pre windows xp SP2. There were enough stories at this time online that I knew it was best to say nothing. Did nothing bad, just explored, learned quite a few things and well was surprised how really easy it was to do things. Nowadays, I feel kids won't/don't get that chance to explore - which is sad. Internet is curated through apps and "enagement" user experience and cloud services/SAAS. Maybe they can spot a lifetime link to a google sheets master password document. ;)

bikingbismuth 5y ago
Netsend made me feel like a true spooky wizard. It bums me out to see how much of our computing has moved north-south.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Teknoman117 5y ago

I was in high school from 2007 to 2011. Half of it in rural Alabama, the other half in the Bay. Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school administration's views on technology and information access were so backwards. Our school basically didn't allow accessing any websites that weren't on some allowlist. Teachers had accounts to bypass the content filter. We had a game design class that happened after school. Usually that period was reserved for making up classes you failed, but ROP courses that didn't align with the district's curriculum goals were taught as well. Needless to say, pretty much every resource we needed was blocked. So the teacher would give out his content filter bypass credentials, because the school wouldn't entertain any exceptions to students not being allowed to have them even though they knew there were classes on campus that would have tremendous difficulty. A couple of times a student would leak the credentials to others on campus and it'd take all of 5 minutes to get to everyone on campus via social media. They'd always treat everyone who knew the bypass accounts as "guilty unless proven otherwise". I ended up in detention a few times for even knowing it. Parents complained to the school a bunch, school just always blanket said "bypassing the content filter as a student is against policy for any reason. No exceptions." Makes me think back to 1st grade in 1999 when I was first given internet access and being told not to use Google because "it wasn't safe". Couldn't have been that bad because it took another half decade for me to inadvertently end up on the "adult" part of the internet.

riversflow 5y ago
Similar time period, I used portable Firefox and then Chrome on a thumb drive to bypass our content filter. I actually find this surprising in retrospect, but I'd guess they were using Content Advisor on Internet Explorer[1]. I carefully guarded my secret. [1] this pdf appears to lend credence to that idea(no affiliation). https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_HomeUsers.pdf https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_Home...
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  If I were smarter, I probably would have learned about proxy servers. I was tantalizingly close as is. I had set up port forwarding on our home router and a dyndns account to access my (Linux) desktop via ssh. I'm almost surprised it took me another few years to bump into SOCKS proxies. I already had 99% of the setup, just not the final step. Oh well I guess. Our school was Windows land as well. They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP (they had never adopted Vista, and 7 was still "too new"). Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops. There was also that time I got detention for riding my bike in the school parking lot. Which was dumb, because I always showed up 30+ minutes before any cars did because I made a deal with the sculpting teacher that I wouldn't have to do sculpting if I showed up early to class and learned about the chemistry of clay glazes along with helping him mix them for class, which was honestly far more interesting to me. Our AP Chemistry teacher was a nuclear engineering postdoc from MIT who spent her entire career helping clean up after US military nuclear accidents. High school was a weird time. It just boggles my mind still to this day to have a school staffed by some wonderfully brilliant teachers and have an administration that seemed to lived in fear of a student body who dared learn something or learn from someone they didn't approve of.

kingcharles 5y ago

When I was 11 I social engineered the son of the computing teacher to get all the admin passwords. Then I fucked around with a whole bunch of stuff and showed a friend. When they figured out it'd been hacked they weren't sure who did it, but my buddy broke down very quickly and let them know lol. I was banned from the computer lab for the whole of my secondary school years. It didn't matter though, because when I was 12 (~1989) the headmaster dropped computing from the school curriculum as "computers are a passing fad". They just used the computers for typing up essays after that.

Anthony-G 5y ago
> Computers are a passing fad. That reminds me of the Decca record label executives rejecting the Beatles in 1962 because “guitar groups are on the way out”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_Decca_audition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_Decca_audition
cbozeman 5y ago
It's hard not to be critical of this headmaster, but I do have to question both the intelligence and the wisdom of someone who, in 1989, could not clearly see computers had no chance of becoming a "passing fad". Picking up a copy of The Wall Street Journal at any point in the previous ten years could have clearly indicated that... and any school at which there's a "headmaster"... I would expect the WSJ is not a foreign entity to them.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  The fact the parents allowed it to go through, in hindsight, is absurd. The computing teacher did try to teach us outside of school hours some times, but I failed the Computing GCSE (F grade), which is hilarious as at the exact same time I was being offered a job at Argonaut Games after Jez San tried out my 3D engine.

conradev 5y ago

I found the password to my teacher's eBoard[1] in 4th grade (a five digit code) and started changing things as a practical joke. Then I started seeing more five digit codes just written on Post-it notes… [1] https://www.eboard.com https://www.eboard.com