A Recipe For Disaster
Now, dear readers, I have just realised I actually do have a story to tell. For those of you who are complaining about 'lists of nerdy things', this should hopefully break up the tedium of the other answers for you, although I'm rather enjoying them myself. One point I would like to make is that wherever I refer to 'hacking' in this story, I am simply using a catch-all term which was used by all authorities involved. I wouldn't call myself a hacker in any sense, and I know the methods used are crude and silly, and any real computer experts, of which there aremany on the boards, would sigh and hold their heads in their hands. But I present this story for you, in its fullest, as...

A Recipe For Disaster

The story begins with a group of friends, of which I was a part. We were, quite aptly, named the Nerd Herd, or N3rd H3rd, a cute term we rather liked. Now two of us, who will rename unnamed, were both quite handy with a computer. Endless ICT lessons of 'memos' 'word processing' and the ilk had driven a deepseated boredom into us. We decided that we could have our own ICT based fun, and spice up the lessons a little bit.
I'd discovered, not too long before, a truly gaping security error. Not a one of the school's computer network had a BIOS password set. And so the plan was formed. Use a portable USB distro of Linux, boot into that on the PCs, and have a poke around. The specific name of the distro I have forgotten, and a google search threw up nothing I recognised. Anyway, we cracked on, prepared the flash drive and away we were. Booting into linux and then... well, nothing. There was not a lot to do.
A couple of years, at the same school, with the boredom mounted even higher, we decided to give it another pop. So we prepared ourselves again, and discovered, on each PC, registry files from each user who had recently logged on. Editing one of these, we figured, and then writing it back onto the PC, would enable us to change the user rights which were so constrictive. So we copied these tiny files onto the flash drive, took them home and had hours of fun doctoring them in regedit. Wrote them back onto the PC and... lo and behold, admin-like rights for us. We had a little bit of fun with this, changing the desktop background, etc. And then we wrote back the original registry files and left it at that. Needless to say, we got caught when an IT teacher demanded to know why he didn't have us in the list of 'logged on' PCs. Another trick we'd picked up. Taking the flash drive off us and finding it empty, he figured there must be hidden files on it. And there were. The linux distro, the registry files and some stolen software we'd found in archives on the PCs. Uh oh.
Immediately, we were dragged before the deputy headteacher. Some direct quotes...
'My credit card details are on my computer, have you been in there?'
'You just hate the system, don't you. You're an anarchist!'
'Did you want to change your grades? Is that it?'
We were kicked out of school, for three months, and the police called. School decided they wanted to go ahead and press charges, and claimed we'd caused £15,000 of damage. Yes, you read that right. Fifteen thousand bands worth of damage.
So we were both summoned to the police station. Our school had decided that it would 'drop' the charged os criminal damage totally £15,000, and never produced any documents to back that claim up. Funny that. But we werestill to be charged for Computer Misuse, which I think can carry a five year sentence, but I'm not sure. The two CID officers who interviewed me (with Mum present) had never, ever dealt with a breach of the Computer Misuse Act. They had no idea about any of the technical terms. But they were still very nice, and appreciated me explaining what I had done simply and honestly. They decided a reprimand was the way forward, and told school that they couldn't push any heavier sentence. So we were both reprimanded, which honest to God involves being shouted at by a senior officer. That's no joke, it is actually just a really good dressing down. And sits quite heavily on a criminal record.
Well, returning to school was fun. Hailed as absolute celebrities, some of the rumours we heard were terrific. Apparantly, teachers were questioning Pupils about our 'plot to make all the computers explode on the last day of term' and our 'huge pirate software/porn dealing scheme' (that part was true, my partner in crime had a very lucrative sideline in this. Sadly he wiped all of it when he got busted). Apparantly we changed everyone's grades, made copmuters explode, shared porn on the PCs, read all of the headteachers emails...
People still call me 'That one that hacked the school computers.' and ask how I intended to make them explode.
And that, ladies and gentleman, turned out to be a longer story than I expecting. Apologies for apologising about length, and all that. And any spelling/grammar mistakes I've made.
Ciao!
( Mr. Jack cracked the elite b3ta inner circle on, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 15:52, 2 replies)

kevin mitnick syndrome?
no one understands what you can do, and thinks the worst possible? ;)
(Neomancer last looked smug on, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 22:41, closed)

Yep, that's the one
At least it sounds cool when I tell people :)
( Mr. Jack cracked the elite b3ta inner circle on, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 22:46, closed)