Hack bikes with Quora

First story

Eight years ago in high school, I hacked the main server of my school and did real harm.

In the computer class, we had a computer network with a main server. The computers were all very weak, without hard drives, with PXE boot from the main server.
Each student had his own account on the server.

From the first day I began to look for ways to gain access to admin rights. Nothing worked, at least not with enough permissions, so I used a little extreme method.
')
Once I asked the teacher to help me with the project I was working on, and he agreed. After the lesson I went to him and gave him my flash drive. He inserted it into his terminal, and we began to discuss my “project”.

He did not know that my self-starting Trojan was on the flash drive. The file was encrypted, so he slipped through an already outdated antivirus and infected his terminal. Therefore, now it was necessary only to wait when he tried to log in on the main server.

A few days later I already had the administrator account information sent to me by my Trojan, so I was able to log in to the main server. This server was part of the internal school network.

On this network was the main server. Access to it was provided by the same account information ... Obviously, I got access to the entire library of school documents and prepared tests ...

After downloading a few, I brought down the server with malware. During the whole school year, the network did not work. And they never caught me.

As I later found out, their idiot sysadmin thought that the problem was with the central processor, and decided to replace it ... Feyspalm.

Note: Some have the impression that I enjoy the harm I have done. This is not true. I am not proud of what I did, but at that time I was a teenager, insane and, worse, stupid, and I did not think about the consequences or moral aspects.

Today I am a system administrator who is involved in preventing what I have done in the past. I use my experience and knowledge to protect systems from the same idiots as I once was.

Anonymus

Second story

It was at the beginning of the bitcoin revolution ... and I was looking for something to spend bitcoins ... and wandered into the darknet.

It was 2010 ... a little earlier on Silk Road ... and I definitely used Tor, but I have no idea how the site was called.

There you could buy ANYTHING.

Illegal fake driver's licenses ... passports ... drugs of your choice ... and a guide on how to grow them on your lawn behind the house.

And so I bought bitcoins for $ 650 at the price of that day creeping up (0.06 US cents), which amounted to 9,200 bitcoins (I am Australian, so I lost a little on the exchange rate). And then on September 4, 2010 ... my father had a faint ... and he was in the hospital. Sitting by his bed in the hospital ... in my mind I confessed to him that I intended to start a drug business (and no ... I did not watch Breaking Bad until 2012). It was there and then that I decided that I would not do this while he was alive, so that he was not ashamed of me.

So I cleared the browser history ... and changed my hard drive just in case.

And he remembered this only in 2014, when my sister, having started a conversation about Bitcoins, asked why I was not doing this, being a “techie”.

And I said something like that, that ... I don't do cryptocurrency.

And I remembered that my hard drive (I have about 38, change it if necessary for one or another language / OS) and found it.

And I discovered that I still have 9,200 bitcoins in my wallet.

I haven’t spent it yet ... I somehow don’t share this crazy rush on the subject of bitcoins ... but I look at the change in the price of bitcoins ... and think about when I should tell about them ... in the end.

And should I go into details about why I purchased them?

I'm sure not.

Andrew grimm

Third story

I created an iOS and Android app that can receive free articles from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA today. And distributed to all my friends. News Hack | by Lukas Carvajal

As a student, penniless, I could not afford to subscribe to the newspaper.

And publications limit online access to articles, demanding payment for premium content or limiting the number of free articles.

I did not like that for financial reasons they limit the free flow of knowledge. I thought about how to get around paid access, and found that when translating an article from any language into English using Google Translate, you can access the entire article. So I got free access, but the process of reading, if there were several articles, was inconvenient.

I decided to make a Java application that would analyze the main page of publishing sites for the main information in the article and present the received information as it looks on the site itself. When you clicked on the address of the article and combined it with the address of the Google Translate line, a link appeared that led you to the “translated” article in Google Translate.

In an effort to bring things to mind, I made a similar application on Android, and later on iOS. When I figured out the API calls, I set up LAMP, which collected information from sites every hour and supplied applications with information.

This has significantly reduced download time and created a convenient tool for those who wanted to have free access to periodicals.

Since I wanted my beggars from college to have access to newspaper materials, I decided to distribute this application for many of them.

We all enjoyed using the free subscription to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA Today for about a year, while I had enough time to provide support in accordance with the changes on the sites.

Screenshots:



Lukas Carvajal, Mobile Application Developer

---

The translation was made with the support of EDISON Software , which professionally deals with measurement automation and expert systems , as well as custom software development .