I am the el33t hax0r



  • My story didn't quite make the front page :( but I think it's good enough for here. :)

    So, a few years ago I was in high-school.  It's a small private school, but they have a computer lab with a few dozen PCs running Windows 2K and Office 97, with a class and curriculum for Office 2K, which they did NOT have.  Anyways, I should have realized the first teacher I had there was trouble right off the bat, simply because I knew more about computers than her.  Whenever you know more on the class subject than your teacher, particularly when the subject is computers and the story is being told on thedailywtf.com, it spells trouble.

    There are a couple stories I could relate, but I'll just pick one... one day a student working on the school website, which was publically available over the school network.  It was not protected by passwords or anything, you just needed to know the path to it and you could access it.  This student decided, for whatever reason, to set the local network copy of the webpage as Internet Explorer's homepage.  Perhaps they mistakenly thought they were viewing the online version.

    So I log onto the computer and, with a double click of the blue E, I immediately and instantly hack the school network.  Or so the teacher insisted.

    Every student has their own roaming profile, and apparently access to network resources is logged.  When IE loaded it's homepage, it was logged as an access attempt.

    Later the teacher confronts me, labeling me a hacker and to know demanding why I accessed a network resource I didn't have access to.  Of course I don't know what she's talking about, and I stare at her blankly as she traverses network folders in Windows Explorer that I don't recognize.  It takes a few minutes for me to realize what she's going on about.  But either my lack of people skills, her lack of computer skills, or her apathy towards hackers prevented me from making her understand what happened.

    I don't seem to recall suffering any negative repercussions from this, however.

    Next time I'll tell the story about how I allegedly turned a working Windows 98 box into a broken Windows 95 box inside of 30 minutes with no CDs, diskettes, or network connections. (I swear I'm not making this up, she actually accused me of this.  She claimed she didn't have Win95, so it couldn't have been installed on the box like I said.  Except that it was on there...)



  • Alex usualy doesn't post things about students being stupid.  And with high school teachers you really can't expect much either.



  • After my highschool Computer Science II teacher taught all of Java she knew (which was very very little) she switched to teaching Microsoft PowerPoint. Seriously. She didn't know anymore so she just stopped teaching it.

    I of course didn't like this so I continued to work the problems from the book and ignored all the PowerPoint shit. Surprisingly she let me do it. Since she couldn't grade my work anymore she just gave everything a 100.

    The rest of the class (4 people) seemed content with the PowerPoint stuff.



  • [quote user="The MAZZTer"]Next time I'll tell the story about how I allegedly turned a working Windows 98 box into a broken Windows 95 box inside of 30 minutes with no CDs, diskettes, or network connections. [/quote]
    <font face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Wow you must really be a l33t h4xor! Please tell me how you did it... Please please please...

    Oh wait...



    </font>



  • "Every student has their own roaming profile"

    So how exactly would some other student setting his home page affect you?

    [)amien



  • I still go to school, it's a sort of computer school. I _do_ know more about programming and networking than most of the other pupils at my school, but I still have to pay attention of course, since I don't really know all the details perfectly (yet, hrhrhr ;) ), and thanks god our teachers are mostly very knowledgaeble and seriously very cool.

    When we learned about how the ARP protocol works last year, I remembered that there was something I had read about, "ARP cache poisoning". I read up on that and asked my teacher  about it the next time. He was like "Hm, lets try it out...", while I was like "But won't the admin be pissed?". We ended up setting up a small isolated network and trying out a few MITM attacks to see how that stuff works, while the other people in my class were occupied with some network math excercises, and that sure made me understand network security and how some protocols work a little bit better than only having that explained would have.

    Also, we were supposed to do some MS office learning in our first year there. The teacher basically came in, said "So, who here doesn't know how powerpoint works? No one? Good, here, do this excercises (Basic stuff like "create a slide with this and that color"), if you can do most of that, then we can do the same for word and excel and start with some real stuff next time.". We spent the rest of the year doing design theory and html. The same teacher once caught somebody surfing some WoW forum. His reaction? "Oh, you kids play that, too? I leveled some chars up to 60 in the beta. Now get back to work already, you can surf when you're done.".

     



  • [quote user="The MAZZTer"]Whenever you know more on the class subject than your teacher, particularly when the subject is computers and the story is being told on thedailywtf.com, it spells trouble.[/quote]

    Back in 1998 I took an entry level college class on Java, from a business teacher.  I know what you mean.  I slept through all my classes and still got the highest grade.  The teacher was using a better teacher's homework standards even though he couldn't teach like the better teacher.  The class average was about 50%.



  • The MAZZTer:
    Whenever you know more on the class subject than your teacher, particularly when the subject is computers and the story is being told on <font color="#02469b">thedailywtf.com</font>, it spells trouble.

     

    During 2nd year in my Software Development course we began placing bets on how many mistakes on our exam papers would be called out during our programming exams, and how many more mistakes will be pointed out afterwards. There was always a minimum of 6 mistakes on any given exam paper. We were frequently asked to write code in C++ that was to include classes or functions that our lecturer had written, however a lot of the time this given code was either completely or partially written in Java.



  • I took a high school programming course in C++ and got bored rather quickly.  The examples in class always used variable names like Bob, Jim, or one of the teachers dogs name.  She had no restrictions on the coding, just as long as it worked.  For the last assignment I decided I was going to challenge myself as well as give her a hard time with grading my assignment.  I wrote an entire program (about 1000 lines) as one main function and using if () goto; as the only control structures.  I got 100% on the assignment, but heard from students the following year that she specifically banned the use of goto's.



  • Yeah, I got one too..

     So my highschool made the unfortunate decision to use Macs (which I like) crippled with AtEase (which I detest).   AtEase is a program /operating system extension which replaces the Finder (mac version of Explorer, i.e., the program which the OS runs when there's no other program running), and also cripples save/load dialog boxes etc...

     Anyway, this program offers no real security, because they also happened to install NCSA Telnet, a telnet client with a built in FTP server.  It was a simple exercise to run that, connect to myself, cd System Folder: ...

    But, I didn't want to break the thing, so I didn't do it.  But I'll bet the rm command would have worked fine.

     

    I did have a lot of fun scaring teachers by booting newer Macs into OpenFirmware and showing off the binary calculator/forth environment in there.  That made them really fidgety 'cause they just had no clue what I was doing but couldn't help trusting me anyway. =) 



  • [quote user="DamienG"]

    "Every student has their own roaming profile"

    So how exactly would some other student setting his home page affect you?

    [)amien

    [/quote]

    Good question... maybe Windows 2000 doesn't have as good control over application settings?  I dunno.  Maybe they weren't roaming profiles at all, but I'm pretty sure they were.  At any rate, IE settings were always local to the computer they were on and affected anyone who logged onto the computer.



  • Way back when I was in highschool, I ended up in the assistant principals office after the librarian accused me of hacking a website on a school computer.

     

    What did I do? I right-clicked and 'viewed source'.

     

    That was the same year I was 'taught' C++ by a math teacher. She was teaching arrays, and while she did start counting at 0, she claimed the last element in the array was 'arraysize', not 'arraysize - 1' - you know what I mean. I corrected her. Then we argued about it all period. Then she cried. 



  • Of course, none of the -real- hacking I did ever got caught. We had a sort of roaming profile thing too (Novell, ew.) and all students had some storage space on the central server they could get at from any computer in the building. I got access to the student space root. All the student directories were named using the student's name - four leters of their last name, 2 of their first. I created a new folder that looked like a student directory, but didn't actually corrospond to a student. Then I installed quake in it. Now, obviously, students didn't have access to other students folders through explorer - but they did through notepad's open file dialouge, if they typed the directory path in directly. It was simple. 'F:/smitjo'. Then they could right click quake.exe, and select 'run'. End result: You could play quake from any computer in the school. We had servers running all the time. It got discovered twice; once when some idiot was caught (I just reinstalled it in the same directory) and again during my senior year, when some freshman who actually was named john smith started. As far as I know, they never had a clue who stuck it there - I never heard about it. I had 'admin' access to the entire network right up until I graduated - at which point I was an alumni, and could point it out to the real network admin with impunity.

     Another time, I stuck a photoshop of these two bitches engaging in lesbian intercourse into everyone's space.

     And I took screenshots of desktops, set them as the wallpaper, then deleted all the icons. I did that a lot. It never got old. :)


  • So here is my "I am a computer teacher who shouldn't be teaching computers" story:

    It was a class on VB6 and ASP, not .NET because they coudn't afford to buy all those upgrades.  The teacher would give us "tests" where he would hand us a few pages stapeled together, showing us exactly what the website was supposed to look like/do.  This "test" had two pages, the first had an input box asking for the persons name and a submit button, and the second would display "Hello, your name is [NAME]".  I felt bored, so I kept the first bit but changed the second page to say:
    Hello, [NAME]
    You have __ characters in your name
    Your name spelled backwards is [EMAN]

     The teacher gave me a D on the assignment, and he said "Well, you would have gotten an A, plus some extra credit, but you said 'Hello, [NAME]' instead of 'Hello, your name is [NAME]', like it said on the test sheet"
     

     



  • It sounds far too much like my own experiences with stupid IT teachers. Oh, the fun we had at the expense of the expensive new Admin.

    Let's see... First of all, me and my friends used to make CPU burners with javascript, and annoying flashing windows bouncing all over the screen. The admin accused us of 'hacking,' of course.

    A few weeks later, I came into school with a C++ chat program I'd written. Stupidly, we were able to execute EXEs from our "my documents" folders. She started to notice it, so I made a hide feature that shrank it down to a small icon on the lower-right of the screen next to the clock. A few weeks later, EXEs were shut down about a second after they started. Instead of changing permissions and stopping them from executing, they actually had a program that read the titles of windows and moved the mouse to click the close button. Isn't there a better way of doing this in windows? If your app was not windowed, or finished what it was doing faster than the thing could close it, it was totally useless.

    Next, one of my friends found we could write JScript for the Windows Scripting Host and execute that (which sped up hack development a lot). He got banned from the network a lot for doing that. One time, after his account was recreated, he found he had ADMIN priveleges. He could control other people's desktops, modify the contents of network drives, etc. He changed the text of the 'Log off' icon on the desktop to 'Bog Off,' and it changed the text on everyones' desktops. It was two weeks before they noticed. They figured out who it was from the giggling coming from our corner and accused us of 'hacking' again.

    In the end, we even petitioned them to disable WSH running from user's accounts, but they said it was required for their system to work. I found out why when they moved the systems from windows 2000 to XP. They'd added a shell script that opened a console and outputted two lines of text , both "Do not close this window." It seemed to disable the blue XP theme. Crazy. I closed the window whenever I saw it and mine was the only desktop in blue. I was accused of hacking for that too.

    This was the admin who spread an infectious email virus through the school by opening an attachment AFTER being warned about it by the county council...

    Woo my first post. Please be gentle.



  • Wow. Fortunately for me, I had an amazing CS teacher in 11th/12th and the syllabus was quite theoretical apart from the C++ programming. Much of what I studied/am studying in the first 3 sems of college C++, ComputerScience and Algorithms/DataStructures, we already did in high school!



  • [quote user="halcyon"]

    The same teacher once caught somebody surfing some WoW forum. His reaction? "Oh, you kids play that, too? I leveled some chars up to 60 in the beta. Now get back to work already, you can surf when you're done.".
    [/quote]

    Oh yes! We played Unreal Tournament, Need for Speed and (sometimes, because it was our teacher's favourite) Age of Mythology in our school's computer labs ;-)  Not too many people though, around 10-12 computers on the network (entire CS class). There was this one time we were playing UT (teacher used to join in), and someone brought and plugged in speakers. Next thing we know, other teachers from nearby classrooms crowded up infront of the lab to find out where the heck were those "arghhh"..."sucker!" sounds coming from. Heh.

    Our teacher's logic was - if you get done with your assignments before it's due, then why not have fun during the remaining days? He also allowed me access to the network setup, and encouraged me to create, install and test network software after he saw an IM client I had written. He said you won't get unrestricted access to a network with 25+ computers, so use the opportunity as much as you can.

    Because of the liberal policies, our class was also way above average in terms of scores, half of the class was brilliant, and the other half worked very hard.



  • [quote user="j_johnso"] For the last assignment I decided I was going to challenge myself as well as give her a hard time with grading my assignment.  I wrote an entire program (about 1000 lines) as one main function and using if () goto; as the only control structures.  I got 100% on the assignment, but heard from students the following year that she specifically banned the use of goto's.
    [/quote]

    Hehe.. reminds me of our high school CS lab final. We had an "external" examiner come to our school and we were determined to give him a memorable time.

    The assignment was to select one of the 3-5 problems (usually more involved stuff like bank database, Base64 (de)coder etc.), solve it using C++, write the usage manual, program documentation etc. and submit it along with a printout of the code and sample input/output.

    After solving our assignments, we did some.... "code formatting" ;)  I removed all indentation, whitespaces, line breaks etc. Changed variables names to 1 or 2 lettered cryptic names, function names were equally ambiguous. The whole source code looked like one giant paragraph of ASCII symbols.........

    I did get full points. Not sure about the other guy who did the same, he probably did too.

    Here in university, the CS lab has 5% credit for good formatting and clear code (not more than 5% because it's an algorithms lab, not pure programming).
     



  • [quote user="cdcarter"]

    So here is my "I am a computer teacher who shouldn't be teaching computers" story:

    It was a class on VB6 and ASP, not .NET because they coudn't afford to buy all those upgrades.  The teacher would give us "tests" where he would hand us a few pages stapeled together, showing us exactly what the website was supposed to look like/do.  This "test" had two pages, the first had an input box asking for the persons name and a submit button, and the second would display "Hello, your name is [NAME]".  I felt bored, so I kept the first bit but changed the second page to say:
    Hello, [NAME]
    You have __ characters in your name
    Your name spelled backwards is [EMAN]

     The teacher gave me a D on the assignment, and he said "Well, you would have gotten an A, plus some extra credit, but you said 'Hello, [NAME]' instead of 'Hello, your name is [NAME]', like it said on the test sheet"
     

     

    [/quote]

    Maybe that taught you to read the spec?

    Hehe, I remember getting in trouble for "hacking" my primary schools computer when I was in grade 6. It was a MicroBee with an amber display, and I managed to program it to display purple. It really hurt the eyes though, and I think it offended my teacher.



  • The sweet times at school IT classes... I can admit, when I was 6th grade, I knew less than our IT teachers. After that though (I changed school), I don't remember a lot stuff that I actually learned in school that is related to IT (pretty much just document standards & other office related stuff that I have never needed).Of course, this has provided many great 'wtf' moments for me.

    For example, when we had java programing classes, we had a replacament teacher for the first two weeks and quite frankly, he didn't know anything about Java (I hadn't touched Java either before the course. I had used C# & php tho). He even admited it, so we weren't learning any java. Just programming basics (like how pseudo language works). Once the actual teacher came tho, I just requested her to give me whatever stuff we were supposed to do at the course. Finished everything during the first 4 lessons (we have almost always 2x45min lessons one time. That time we had 4x45min lessons), so next ~40 lessons we had of that subject, I was home.

    Oh yeah, and thanks for the all ideas (had something similar in my mind already). I will have an internet programing course starting from next week, so I assume I will be having fun either by going in classes or staying home ;)


Log in to reply