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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?
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.
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.
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
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...
I've got a similar story that's similar
:)
I love those similar stories that are similar.
I love my sig.
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!
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.