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Student Logs Teachers Keystrokes
handy_vandal writes "A 16-year-old student has been charged with a misdemeanor for rigging a keystroke-recording device onto a teacher's computer. School district police received a tip from students that the boy was trying to sell answers to final exams. The District Attorney's Office has charged the teen with breach of computer information, a Class B misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 and up to 180 days in jail. This sort of thing has happened before. The problem is so pervasive that the GRE board has switched from computers back to paper and pencil."
Sometimes even the teachers need to be taught a lesson.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
My wife just started teaching 9th and 10th grade high school math. I gave her a little crash course on basic computer security (including watching out for keyloggers!)
It's common knowledge that the kids are smarter than the teachers, computer-wise... but hasn't it always been that way?
Most people I meet don't necessarily think computer security is a problem past virii and adware -- and it shouldn't necessarily be their problem, it requires better design. But could their be a lesson here as to the importance of real-life, practical security needs?
Every computer added to a classroom is another nail in the coffin of modern teaching. There is nothing added by adding a computer, but much is taken away.
Computers ought to remain in "computer labs" and perhaps on the desks for specialized "computer classes", but they definitely don't belong anywhere else.
Creative usage of computers for teaching is a copout on the kids. By removing the teacher/student relationship and replacing it with an inanimate object, the kids lose out on a great deal of education. This is why home-schooled kids typically do better in college than "computer schooled" kids do.
Is it any surprise that the more technology becomes a part of these kids' educations, the more likely it is that the bad apples are going to find ways to exploit the system?
...uses a keylogger DONGLE?
Seriously. Did he think that the teacher wouldn't notice a DONGLE that was added to the computer?
Please. At least use a trojan-type keylogger, or something even slightly covert.
I, too, have switched from computers to paper and pencil for storing sensitive information like password lists. I don't trust PCs when it comes to security.
if they placed the computers (with the tests) someplace better. As /.ers know, the most important part of computer security is physical access.
Remove the computer (with the tests) to somewhere that only teachers' can go, and you'll mostly eliminate the problem, without resorting to pen and paper.
Before we all start to scream bloody murder this, fascist law that, I would like to say that this kid got what he deserved. He is not a victim here. The victim is a teacher whose privacy was violated and the attorney deserves our support this time. This case is completely unlike the one of DVD John or Kevin Mitnick. The 180 days in jail is nothing in this case. So please, let's stop our knee-jerk reactions and congratulate the law enforcement just once when they in fact have done a good job. No need to panic here, no need to remind about 1984 or the Third Reich, because this kid was the one who was spying on his teacher and who belongs in jail. This story is only about "Your Rights Online" because your rights could be as easily violated like the rights of that teacher were violated by his student. We need to be protected from spies, be them MIAA, NSA or our students.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
It's common knowledge that the kids are smarter than the teachers, computer-wise... but hasn't it always been that way?
;)
This is true. When I was in junior high in the early 90s, we had some basic computer course that involved filling out answers to some questions on a computer. I don't really remember that much about it now. But one day a bunch of us were in the lab and we found the teacher's disk, which had the answers to everything. We entered the disk and the program asked for a password. My friends were ready to give up. I thought for a moment and typed in "hello". It worked... first try. It was hilarious. My friends, most of whom hadn't used computers much by that time, thought I was some kind of serious hacker.
I guess this was a lot funnier in 1992. But the point is... I'm sure then, just like now, the teachers thought everything was secure. There's always someone who's going to prove them wrong.
Not a thing. It has to do with a dishonest kid who got busted doing something wrong. But sure as the earth turns, someone here will twist it into some dark big brother scheme to strip the common man of our rights. Somehow.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
This isn't some poor misguided kid who got thrown in jail because the "lab monitor" saw him using "that Linux hacking tool" on the school Windows machines. Nor is it some grey-hat hacker pushing boundaries. When you actively go and install a keystroke monitor on a machine that is not yours, you're out to get information that you shouldn't have, period. It's totally premeditated, too - it's not like he was poking around in /tmp and found a MS Word auto-save backup file with the answer key in it, or was rummaging around in the trash can because he dropped his retainer and found the answer key - he deliberately went and got a keystroke logger and put it on the machine. There's no possible way to spin this as an innocent kid getting screwed.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Diabolical technique! Who would have thought!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Perhaps I'm way off base here, but I assumed the person with violated rights was the teacher. I'm sure people in other professions risk having their clients log keystrokes or otherwise violate privacy. Of course, the school board (employer) could log keystrokes, but that's entirely different.
-- SYS 64738 --
Back in my high school spanish class, the teacher made an offer that if anyone could figure out his Windows screensaver password (which was a spanish nickname his grandma gave him), he'd give that person an A for the year. The fool.
Damn it son.. I thought I taught you right... Keep the price low.. sell more.. keep people happy.. you stay out of trouble.. now look at what you have done...
A Class B misdemeanor. Maximum punishment of $2000 and 180 days in jail. When ever there is a crime reported in the news, they always list the maximim possible punishment. Makes it sound much worse.
How much you wanna bet he gets a fine and community service? Not all judges automatically give out the max punishment, especially for a first time HS kid offender, and especially for a crime where there was no physical harm or actual property/monetary theft
I did that too. We logged into our accounts in DOS; I wrote a DOS emulator that mimicked the basic command set. When they tried to log in, it would add their password to a list, state that there was an error, and then log out of my account to the real login prompt.
:)
I never stole tests or anything of the sort. However, I did have fun when the final project came around. While everyone was writing little text games or whatnot, I wrote this full-featured graphical demo. One of the scenes in the demo was a stereogram generator. The hidden image in the stereogram was the teacher's administrator login and password.
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
In my senior year of high school, the school I went to implemented a pilot program called, "Anytime, Anywhere Learning." It was some sort of thing done by Microsoft and Toshiba where we were supposed to learn with laptops.
Apparently, the plan was that giving kids computers and having them use them in class would lead to instant learning.
I will say that we did learn a lot. I learned how to pierce firewalls, how to tunnel traffic through firewalls, and how to spend my days downloading MP3s and chatting with classmates rather than listening to lectures.
The teachers, for their part, learned to tell us to keep the laptops in their bags. They also learned that there are about eight million things you can do with a chalkboard that you can't do with PowerPoint, and that the things you can do on both take less effort on a blackboard if you take the time to prepare a set of real lecture notes. They learned that there are a lot of things you can do with textbooks that you can't do with webpages, and they learned that if you let kids use webpages as sources for papers, you're going to get a lot of really crappy papers. They learned that it's impossible for the students to take good notes on a laptop from the moment the lectures start involving diagrams, and it's never possible to take good notes on a laptop in a math class. They learned that there are 8,542 ways to break a laptop, and a pack of 64 students are perfectly capable of finding all of them in less than two weeks.
All in all, they learned that putting a computer on every desk makes about as much sense as putting a TV on every desk.
The network login we had was some version of Novell Netware. I just made a program that looked like it in BASIC and ran it from DOS-PROMPT. After an attemptive login, I would just make it freeze there, like the computers would sometime do; they'd reboot and lauch the regular one. After I got a teacher's password whose accounts had administrator status(or were able to make new users who had admin status, one of those two), then me and my friends made new accounts and we could install games on them, just stupid stuff, we were like 11 and 12. We got caught because my one idiot friend saved a poem assignment he wrote on one of the admin accounts he made so he could print it later. When the admin came around from the central office for the school board to do whatever maintenance, it was all found out. I got fingered in the scheme by my friend, but I was a much better social hacker than computer hacker and just lied and convinced my way of the situation, even though I was the main culprit.
I remember my teacher asking the whole class for a show of hands, "who knew that this was going on?" and over half the class raised their hands. Anyway, goes to show, you can only trust yourself. Or, maybe, perform better network security so 11 year olds aren't able to bring it down.
I note that I haven't kept up my deviant ways, in fact, I haven't kept up my computer ways, I've only got university Programming I, which is to say I don't have anything.
How ofteh do you check the connections to your computer, I meann REALLY check them, like close enough to see if there's something extra there? How about a work computer, where it's under a desk? How about one that you don't manage, that someone else takes care of?
When you get down to it, most people won't notice for a long time. My computer is even exposed, and I walk past the back of it every time I go to sit down and use it, and I have to admit, it'd probably escape my notice unless I was doing some maintenance. I simply don't look closely at the cables regularly, no reason to, and a casual glance wouldn't register a small difference in the bunch that comes out the back.
It's quite effective, on PS/2 computers at least. Main problem is decyphering the data later, since all you get is keystrokes, in the order they came in. IF it's someone who multitasks ans switches apps a lot with the mouse, or does lots of mouse cut n' paste, you can get a real jumble that's hard to understand. However for a username/password combo, usually easy to find.
I was an admin at a high school for a year. Some of the fun things I discovered...
I'm sure I found keystroke loggers on a few lab machines. Reimage time.
VNC made it on to the master image. Discovered it as midterm marks were being inputted on the same machines. Of course, there is a paper verification, but still, I had 4 labs of compromised machines with no trusted image.
Caught a student once logging into a teacher area while reviewing the logs. How? He used his own user id, in a place where students don't have access. Instant visit to the administration and a suspension. I had no problem with keeping him locked out for the rest of the year, but I was overruled. Obviously not the brightest... use someone else's account!
Students loved creating shortcuts to the C drive. My daily "shortcut scan" took care of those. 24 hour lockout.
The IT department was either overworked/underpaid, or not actively monitoring things. Students downloaded fun things like kazaa, morpheus, winmx, etc plus associated spyware (before I knew what it was). Yet the board firewall blocked outgoing ssh, so I couldn't update the school's web site from within the building.
Image was broken so students couldn't change their password. So, they wrote down their user id's and assigned alpha-numeric passwords. Of course, that left no accountability ("I didn't download that!")
Teachers were also a part of the problem. I immediately forced everyone's password to expire when I discovered the security problem. I had to reset half of them to "password" with the "do not expire password" flag. No matter how many times I explained why they needed a secure password (it only takes one teacher password to compromise ALL the marks, for example).
I also would have liked to set better lockout policies, including a 1 concurrent login policy. Teachers tended to let students share accounts, instead of sending them to me for a password reset. In some cases, students were already locked out for violations, and the teachers let them "borrow" another student's account!
I had control of my own machine, and I had a group policy denying all student logins on it. I wish I could have set it on the teacher workstations though. I didn't trust some of the teachers to not let students log in on those machines. 1 logger and we're back to the beginning.
One of the IT people said it best. The average demographic of a hacker is a 14-18 year old male. That described half of my students.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
What's the typical jail sentence for stealing an exam key in a school? Hell, when was the last time someone got convicted for cheating during during a school test?
There is nothing inherently secure about USB. USB keyboards use a standardized format. The main thing that keeps you from making a keylogger is the protocol complexity -- you have to understand the usb protocol to log keystrokes. I think it's definitely doable (even though it's definitely more complex than PS/2).
There was a lab that I used to hang out in. Being one of the few geeks in the school, I pretty much had run of the place. The teacher who oversaw the lab encouraged creativity and ingenuity. Sometimes he'd get pissed with something I did, but in those cases I just fixed it and moved on. This kind of activity, over a year or so, ended up earning his trust as I would also fix the odd problems with windows/autocad and such that would crop up.
:)
Eventually I became the de-facto admin for that entire lab. During my required study period he would give me a pass to hang out in his lab--sometimes even when other classes were in there. Talk about heaven. I had the run of a computer lab that was networked. It was like being a king.
Around my junior year or so, they replaced the computers in the lab (aging 386/486 era machines with DOS, mostly) with shiny new Pentiums running Windows. For a few months they were basically just open and normal Windows machines. I think they even had Internet access. This was, of course, a total disaster. The net was new, then. People didn't have it at home. They downloaded anything and everything. Porn, viruses, music, etc.
The result was a *cough* admin *cough* who ended up being the room almost everyday for awhile. He would spend his time poking around in control panels and "fixing" the computers. Eventually be must have gotten sick of that because they hired a local consulting company to come in to secure them all. Pretty soon the whole place was all passworded up with all these layers of cheap third party locks, etc.
I broke all of them--with full (unofficial) support of the teacher who taught in the room. They had tried to lock the systems down so much that half his programs wouldn't work right anymore. He had endless problems with students just trying to save their completed CAD drawings. I made a lot of those problems go away by circumventing the security, showing him how, and then giving him pointers to try to minimize the visibility of the hole so that other kids and the admin dude wouldn't find it. Not perfect, but it helped.
After some time of this the teacher pulled me aside one day and tells me in a reasonably loud-so-that-others-near-by-can-hear voice that I need to be careful because Mr. Admin is getting pissed that someone keeps getting into his system and he's going to try for suspension of that person when he is caught. Of course nearly every one of his students knew it was me--but they weren't talking. I had helped them all out of jams at some point or other. So after doing the public speech, he later pulls me aside in private and says, "Hey, keep doing what you're doing. I'll make sure they don't do anything to you. Those bastards are making my life such a living hell and they won't listen to my needs that I've given up trying to deal with them. You at least make it possible for me to teach my classes."
So of course after the next round of "security upgrades" I was once again on the job. Eventually I figured the way into the system and changed all the screen savers to be the marquee one and had it read, "Ha ha! I got in Mr. Security Guy!" Hoo boy did the shit hit the fan. I was shielded from it, but the teacher just loved it. The admin dude was pissed. The consulting guy was there almost everyday for like 2 weeks. My teacher would just smile and nod. Eventually they locked it down pretty heavily, but by this point I was a senior and I was graduating early and was out of there.
Those were some good times. Seriously, though, I swear that in this day and age I'd be arrested for information terrorism or some such bullshit. Sure, I made life somewhat difficult for an admin or two, but they brought a lot of it on themselves. They had tried to lock the computers down so much so as to make them almost useless as a teaching tool. And of course Windows itself was so prone to holes, viruses, and other crap that it only made the problem worse. I sure did learn a lot, though. After all, isn't that what school is supposed to be for?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Yeah, very similar stories here... Got to "high school" aged 13 (weird school system where I grew up), and within a year a friend and I had admin accounts on the RM Nimbus (RMNet) Win3.1 network. Within another six months we were actually maintaining the network, (after we watched the "Head of IT" sit and stare at an autoexec.bat file for over half an hour, then solved the problem for him in thirty seconds from another terminal). Eventually we were just solving problems before the IT guy even noticed them (all, of course, unofficially - the Powers That Be would have had the screaming hairy ab-dabs at the thought of the access we had, and did, whenever they found out).
Highlights included:
The Head of IT had a deal with RMNet (the Nimbus ISP that offered cheap rates to educational insitutions) - in return for cheap hosting, he had to look for and report any porn sites he could access so they could be added to the blacklist (still a bit suspicious about that...).
Anyway, the Head of IT used to sit on the only machine with a modem (for hour or two every morning before school), surfing for porn/credit card/warez sites sites, recording the URLs and reporting them to RMNet. The only problem was... he'd never heard of a browser cache.
We actually had friends who'd come in at lunchtime, copy the cache full of porn onto disk and sell it to the other kids for a couple of pounds a time.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
but a fine and the threat of jail time isn't the answer.
I disagree. People seem to think that commiting crimes on a computer is somehow "not as bad" as the normal physical crimes of theft, tresspassing, etc. People need to be taught at a young age that doing things like putting a keystroke logger on a teachers computer is a real crime and not just harmless fun.
If that kid gets a job in an office and throws a keylogger on his bosses computer he will get into some real trouble and rightfully so. They need to learn early on that this kind of behaviour is unnacceptable.
But this is slashdot so I expect a bunch of replys saying that it is not the kids fault but it is the schools fault for not securing their computers.