The Man Who Hacked the Bank of France

First time accepted submitter David Off writes "In 2008 a Skype user looking for cheap rate gateway numbers found himself connected to the Bank of France where he was asked for a password. He typed 1 2 3 4 5 6 and found himself connected to their computer system. The intrusion was rapidly detected but led to the system being frozen for 48 hours as a security measure. Two years of extensive international police inquiries eventually traced the 37-year-old unemployed Breton despite the fact he'd used his real address when he registered with Skype. The man was found not guilty in court today (Original, in French) of maliciously breaking into the bank."

Comments

This reminds me of the time

[The MAZZTer]

At high-school, someone set a network share as IE's homepage and when I logged in and launched IE I got in trouble for it.

Oh, and permissions weren't even properly configured on the share, but they could read logs apparently.

Re:This reminds me of the time

[Anonymous Coward]

I got into trouble at a job once (customer service), because I shared a folder on my hard drive with read-only access for everyone. Somehow, they noticed it was being accessed from the Internet. They suspected me of stealing valuable company data. I had to point out that the contents of the folder were publicly available, and I had only shared them as a convenience for my coworkers. I also tried to point out the idiocy of allowing MS file sharing protocols across the firewall, and assigning public IPs to end-user workstations, but they didn't listen. They had an MSCE on staff who knew all about that sort of thing, and I was just a customer service rep. I quit a short time later.

I still get kind of mad thinking about it, but I am sure they are long gone, as the entire industry moved overseas shortly thereafter. This was in the 90s.

Re:This reminds me of the time

[Quirkz]

A buddy of mine once got detention because he took a teacher's documents folder and placed it about five layers deep inside a set of folders with names like "look inside" "click me" and "keep going". The top level folder was put exactly where the old documents folder was, and other than being nested nothing was renamed, harmed, or anything else. The teacher still went ballistic when she couldn't figure out how to click through a couple of extra folders to find her documents.

I once got a stern talking-to by the journalism teacher when I replaced the standard Mac OS startup screen with a custom image of a badly-drawn bomb (we're talking paintshop in the early 90's here) and the message "this system will self destruct in 10 seconds." Someone outside the department had sat down to use the computer for a minute and apparently panicked when they thought the computer had been turned into an actual bomb.