* * * * *
Hacking your way to worse grades
> (CNN)—It was a breeze for 15-year-old Reid Ellison to hack into his high
> school's computer grading system. But what to do once he broke in took a
> bit more ingenuity.
>
> You see, Reid already has a perfect 4.0 grade point average at Anzar High
> School in San Juan Bautista, California. So to leave his mark, he decided
> to lower his grades to a 1.9 GPA (Grade Point Average)—a meager D+.
>
Via email from Ken [1], Student gets ‘A’ for hacking school computer [2]
He got away with it because he had permission from the school to hack their
computer system.
While I never hacked the computer systems that housed the grades in FAU
(Florida Atlantic University) [3] I did hack a few systems. More
specifically, I tested exploits on the CSE (Computer Science & Engineering)
[4] computers, then promptly reported the holes to the sysadmins there. And
there were a few other things I did (notably in the Computer Graphics Class)
that now a days would get me thrown out of school pronto (okay, so I
disrupted class one day—the instructor was quite boring).
I was, however, there when the CSE (Computer Science & Engineering) found
their systems hacked. Seemed someone broke into the system and replaced the
login program with one that would allow anyone to log in with root privileges
(highest access). It was poorly done from a purely asthetic standpoint—any
non-valid user id (and anything for a password) would get you logged in as
root; the first student that mistyped their userid would get root access and
possibly blow the whole back door.
Sheesh.
A better written program would only allow a certain userid with a special
password access, without the login being logged.
Um … not that I ever did that, mind you.
I mean, if you are going to install a back door, you might as well do it
right …
[1]
http://www.jkaugust.com/kenmaier.htm
[2]
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/12/17/student.hack/index.html
[3]
http://www.fau.edu/
[4]
http://www.cse.fau.edu/
Email author at
[email protected]
