Prisoners in the United States collected computers and went online through the prison network

Here was placed one of the illegal servers created by prisoners.

A prison is a place where people who are dangerous to society are isolated. Here, it is believed, prisoners can be reformed by convincing them to leave the vicious path. The conditions in most prisons are not very good, and people try to improve the quality of their lives on their own. For a modern person who is imprisoned, the situation is aggravated by a ban on equipment. No phones, no familiar Internet - nothing.

Therefore, criminals (and not only) invent a variety of ways to get all this workarounds. Someone carries mobile phones, but someone creates a server and connects it to the prison network to communicate with the outside world. It was this method of improving the conditions of its existence that was chosen by prisoners in one of the American prisons located in Ohio. The reformed criminals created not even one, but two working computers, hid them in the ceilings of the ceiling and hooked them up to the prison network.

Pornographic materials and various software were downloaded to the hard drives, including a proxy server, VPN, VOIP, antivirus, Tor, hacker gadgets and the Wireshark packet analyzer. All this became known thanks to the discovery of the hi-tech hiding place by prison staff.
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All elements of the created computers were received from friends and acquaintances who somehow managed to transfer the details with the parcels. Found the work of prison hackers by pure chance. Those began to load a large amount of data that was noticed by the administrator. In this prison there is a certain limit on traffic, which at some point has been exceeded for some unknown reason. Plus, once the prison network administrator received a system alert about the connected device.

The prisoners managed to hide their actions for about four months. After that, the jailers began searches and checks throughout the prison, as it became clear that something unplanned was happening, and additional terminals appeared in the prison network. They found computers in the ceiling of the toilet, here the monitoring of prisoners is not as strict as in the rest of the prison. In general, it was not too difficult to find computers, since all that was needed was to track “illegal” systems over a twisted pair. This was done.



The authorities were even able to understand where the computer parts came from — the aircraft manufacturing company and the management of schools in the region became an unwitting supplier.

A careful analysis of the media showed that the hard drives were simply clogged with pornographic materials as well as hacker software, which provided the prisoners with the opportunity to crack blocked areas of the prison network, gaining access to closed rooms. A large amount of information was also found on how to make drugs, explosives and other materials and things outside the laboratory. The data of stolen credit cards was also found, with which the prisoners paid for access to various network resources and ordered goods for themselves.

Of course, these computers were used to communicate with the outside world. Thus, the authorities discovered the correspondence of some prisoners with relatives and friends. “I wanted to write yesterday, but I could not get online,” said a message from one of the prisoners who talked to his mother.

Responsible for the incident recognized five people who were transferred to other prisons.



The report of the department that conducted the investigation states the following: “The prisoners took the building and some parts of the computers, which should have been disassembled for parts, installed hard drives, a network card, were carried by computers through the prison several hundred meters, and they were brought through the inspection point, employees of the institution did not check the prisoners, got access to the elevator, went up to the third floor and placed the computers in the ceilings ”. In addition, the prisoners were able to connect their systems to the prison’s power grid and computer network without any problems.

Chief Inspector of the State Randall Meyer said that he was very surprised by this situation. “I was surprised not only by the fact that the prisoners were able to connect to the computer network, but also by the fact that they assembled computers. They managed to carry the systems several hundred meters without checking by the prison staff, and there were several inspection points, after which they entered the administrative part of the prison, ”he said.

Now, officials are going to fix some gaps in the state prison security system, which made it possible to create an illegal prison computer network with their own servers. Officials responsible for the operation of prisons say they are going to do everything so that the situation does not recur. But who knows, to speak is one thing, but to achieve it is quite another.