GenZ also grew up in an era where doing anything mildly interesting on a computer risks getting expelled and having the feds called. The shit I did to learn my trade as a kid would absolutely not fly today.
In high school (2000) I had a course where I downloaded some (freely available) videos for my project. The wrong person caught wind and hauled me in under the computer policy that everyone signed that said “I promise not to download anything”. I made my case that it was 1) condoned by my teacher, 2) relevant to my project, and 3) literally going to websites downloads files (cookies were just stored in a folder back then, as well as temp files for caching) so everyone is in violation.
Had they actually found out about the fact that we bypassed security measures on a bootable CD-ROM that allowed us full system access, including a nifty Visual Basic launcher to install Quake and GTA, or that we figured out every computer used VNC and they all had the same password stored in plaintext in the registry (which we accessed via that bootable media), or that we figured out the same password accessed every networked printer in the county so we could print our school’s logo on that week’s rival school’s printers in barely off-white ink…they’d have had a good case.
> Had they actually found out about the fact that we bypassed security measures on a bootable CD-ROM that allowed us full system access, [...] or that we figured out every computer used VNC and they all had the same password stored in plaintext in the registry (which we accessed via that bootable media)
Hey, sounds familiar!
Our school district had a policy that all new computers went to the high schools, then when those aged out and were replaced went to the elementary schools. They wanted iMacs for the elementary schools. That meant that for a couple years our high school had to have iMacs.
Of course literally everything we were trying to do, all the courses and curriculum, etc were built around Windows. So all of them were set up to dual-boot... Which is to say we didn't even need to haul in any bootable media.
Rebooted into mac, which had absolutely no respect for NTFS file permissions, and copied the SAM registry hive off. Took that home, ran the password hash through a cracker and a day later had the local admin password that was shared among all of the computers in the school.
It too was mostly used for running GTA.
There was also that time with a little light B&E and doing some network cabling under the cover of night. Though I think there's technically no statute of limitations on that so that's probably enough said.
