TechnoLust's Journal: The geekiest thing I did in High School (read disclaimer)

DISCLAIMER: The following is an account of something that happened to me in high school. Although I have always been fascinated with networks and hacking, I'm allergic to jail, so I've had very few chances to put my skills to the test, mostly I'm on the other side securing the network and trying to keep people like me out. I did what I did in this situation because I had the permission of the Network Administrator, and I only changed what I was given permission to. If you don't have permission, then kids, don't try this at home. Ok, with the disclaimer out of the way, lets go...

My Junior year, I was taking a class called Advanced Computer Technology. Basically, what we did in this class was play with some of the latest computer tech. Cutting edge hardware, software, etc. We'd take it apart, find out how it worked, put it back together. Find new, creative ways to use software. The only real work we had to do was a big Science Fair project at the end, and we got graded on how well it did in the competition. This was a little before MP3s came out and that's what I tried to do in my project. I was trying to come up with a way to compress audio and decode on the fly. Mine didn't work so well, because I was trying to use a lossless compression, and I wasn't a very good programmer at the time. I knew it might not do well (Actually it surprised me how well it did do.) so I was looking for a way to not get a bad grade in the class. I talked to the teacher about this. He said, "If you are so worried, why don't you just hack into the network and change your grade in this class?" I said, "How about I change the grades in another class, because you'll be watching for me?" He thought about it a minute and said, "If you can break into my network (he was the net admin) and change the grades for a class, I will give you an A in this class." So I set out to do so. The network at the time was running Novel Netware 3.51 and the teacher thought it was unhackable (we were so naive back then.) So I started out with a little social engineering and a friend helped me write a nifty little program. The physics teacher ran our "Anti-virus" program to remove his "Virus" (last line of autoexec.bat line = "ECHO Stealth Virus detected, please run antivirus." Wonder how that got there?) The antivirus worked (remove echo line) but also had the nice side effect installing my keylogger, which got me the password to his online gradebook. After messing around with the network a few day, I was able to get his Netware password. Go to a public terminal log in as him, access the grade book, add 100 point to the score of every one in Physics, log out. Go wait for the Physics teacher to access the grade book.

I was in the Adv Comp Tech class when a confused Physics teacher knocked on the door and asks my teacher why his grades in one of his classes would suddenly have 100 point added to the raw average. My teacher glanced at my smiling face and said, "I'm sure it was a freak glitch, won't happen again." After the Physics teacher left, he brought his grade book to my desk, and wrote an 'A' in pen next to my name, and said, "Good job, you've proven you have a grasp of Advanced Computer Tech." The next week he told me he had given my account on the network admin priveledges, and asked if I would help him keep it running smoothly. I did, but for some reason, my print jobs always seemed to end up at the front of the queue after that. ;-)

Props: Thanks to Leven Valera because posting this reply to his comment is what put me on a tangent that reminded me of this story.

First Post!!!

[Em Emalb]

I'd like to give props to..just kidding dude.

Sounds like you are a really lucky young ninja, to have a kick ass teacher like that. Wish I did when I went through school...Pay them more!!!!!!

Em