Coding Horror: I Was a Teenage Hacker
I have fond memories of "hacking" in high school. The school system I went to used Deep Freeze to protect their Win98 computers. You could format the hard drive, change all of the settings, etc, and upon reboot, the image would return, unchanged. Naturally, this led to deep investigation into how it worked. The system administrators weren't stupid but were severely undermanned, and had left the Deep Freeze program slightly vulnerable. A little command line work and you could remove the protection mechanism for the given session, allowing you to persist changes. So, I did things like edit the shell in HEX and change "START" button to say "FARTS", lame things like that. The suspense was that supposedly the maker of the software would fly anyone who could crack their system out to New York to demonstrate. Despite finding the above hole, I was never able to totally eradicate the software, and could persist only certain changes (changing the startup image, playing funny .WAV files on boot, etc).<p>My biggest mistake was sharing this knowledge with my classmate, who used it to do a great many annoying and potentially harmful things. After doing things like sending "I 0wn j00!" to 11,000 computers on the network (via NET SEND), crashing the shared network drive with millions of blank text files, etc, he finally got caught after badly damaging 3 of the computers in our lab using my hack method that I'd written a batch file to accomplish and given him the disk.<p>I was called to the computer lab by my awesome programming teacher, who informed me that he had to leave the building in 45 minutes, and if the computers weren't back to their proper state by then, we'd both probably be suspended. The other kid just sat there, while I furiously reversed the changes and got out with a few minutes to spare.<p>Naturally, the next year, him and a couple of my other classmates were suspended or expelled for repeatedly crashing the entire 11,000 network with advancements on my initial script. I was thankful that there was apparently no ties left to me in the program's execution, but that was warning enough to focus on productive things for the remainder of my high school career.