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Alaskan Middle Schoolers Phish Their Teachers
lukej writes "In Ketchikan, Alaska a small group of unidentified students gained access to school owned computers by using phishing techniques on their teachers. The then used the elevated access to remotely control their peers computers. Fortunately the school administrators seem to have a taken a realistic and pragmatic viewpoint of the situation, although no official punishment has yet been determined. '"Kids are being kids," (Principal) Robinson said, adding that he was surprised something like this had not already occurred. "They're going to try to do what they try to do. This time we found out about it."'" And no one got arrested.
In related news, the students were found to have changed their grades and purchased airplane tickets.
In other news, the WOPR unit in NORAD is reported to be acting funny. It keeps asking to play games.
They expel and charge kids with felonies for far less....
sig?
Sure, and the teachers should be able to fix the heater when it breaks.
While I support teaching anyone with access to computers the ins and outs of same, expecting your eighth grade teacher to be part security consultant is a bit of stretch.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Aside from the temperature...
Apparently in Alaska you can pull a prank and it doesn't get turned into a life-altering jail sentence and you being labeled a terrorist. Alaska may be the last refuge of what being in the United States really used to be all about. Too bad the terrorists won in the lower 48.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
logic and reasoning in a schoolhouse, what ever is this nation coming to? this must be stopped!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So, Maths teachers should also be tops in history, english, PE, biology, IT... etc, etc ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I remember doing this back in 1993. While I didn't use email phishing I chummed up to the network admin and came up for excuses for him to enter his password as I watched him type it in. Created my own administrator account to give myself access to all programs that were restricted to students. Mostly so I'd have free access to the few games they had on the network :) They never knew.
I still remember the password too: "ersm" - ever so secure.
since there are only 3 children on Ketchikan
Yeah, I remember discovering the wonders of net send * School will be closing early today
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Reading in between the lines I suspect it could have looked wildly different, but the teachers were trained to look for some specific text string which the students got to appear in the elevation dialog.
The UAC dialog is designed to look different if a executable is digitally signed to prevent just this sort of phishing attack. Either the school IT screwed up by not using signed tools, or the teachers were not trained on the differences between the dialogs for signed and unsigned elevations.
But they should have better computer skills then the students they teach. The point of a teacher is to teach and when the students can out pace them in an area it means they can't.
If you remember what it was to be a child at all you'll remember that children have *lots* of time to get good at this sort of thing. A child who's into computers can spend much more time learning the ins and outs than a teacher who has a job and home life, etc. You can't expect a teacher to always know more than *every* child they teach.
Middle school in the US is where you start to see teachers specialize (In elementary school you tend to have a single teacher for the majority of the day and only switch for things like music/gym/etc)
Middle school was when I first took apart my parent's computer, ran up the phone bill connecting to BBSs (as a kid not realizing that same area code didn't mean local), and started learning the ropes about computers by struggling to get the sound working at the same time as other components. (config.sys autoexec.bat, etc)
To expect a teacher, who may have no real interest in computers, to keep pace with the insatiable curiosity of a student 'looking under the hood' is simply not reasonable.
Would you expect the English teacher to be able to outpace a student who picks up an interest in Geology?
When I was 12, I also got really into airplanes, and studied hard to get my pilot's license asap. Would you expect any non-pilot teachers to have more knowledge about FAA regulations than a budding hobbyist?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Yes, you're completely clueless.
The reason why few teachers can handle more than one subject is primarily an issue of training. If you don't train the teachers to teach multiple subjects, and permit them time to learn the ins and outs of teaching it, then you're not going to get many teachers that go to the trouble.
When all is said and done, if you want higher standards, then you're going to have to pay better, do a better job of managing the schools and generally stop treating teachers like crap. There's a reason why the average career as a teacher in the US is only 5 years. By the time they've gotten the hang of it, they're being pushed out the door.
A chum in my science seminar class hacked into the principal's office phone, so we could listen to him from the classroom whenever we wanted. When it was close to graduation, he got bored and patched the phone line into the school public address speakers, so all day his calls were broadcast in every classroom (they figured it out and he stopped using his phone after an hour or so).
After lunch, the principal called our buddy up to the office. He asked him "Do you by any chance know something about this?" Our buddy said "Yep." Principal said, "Just go fix it and we won't ask any more questions, ok?" He did, and that was that, no call to his parents or anything.
Now in the early 1950s, when my DAD was in high school, they just led a cow upstairs and locked it in the bathroom (Cows can walk up stairs better than they walk down). It's pretty easy to imagine the same kids pulling the same kind of pranks with the technology of the day.
Gently reply
I'm sorry, but that's utter bullshit.
Seriously, I'm a teacher and even though I already know the content, it doesn't let me off the hook for figuring out how to convey that content to a new group of students. For every 5 minutes of homework I assign to the students, that's easily an hour of my time that I have to spend designing the assignment and assessing the results. And that's just if I'm doing a check off that they did it. If I have to actually check the quality in any meaningful way it can take a lot more time than that.
As for knowing less than the student, perhaps if the tax payers would shoulder some of the expense of training and certification that would be more reasonable. As it is, teachers work long hours and have to keep up with their certifications on their own. Expecting them to have time to also keep on top of the subject in areas where students might have interested, is rather unreasonable.
Well, some can see communists from their house.
rewriting history since 2109
One time I was sent to the Principal's office and while waiting outside, his secretary left the room. I pull out one of her drawers and sure enough the password to the school's grading computer "PENCIL" was right there. I used it to change some of my grades...
;)
You must have gotten a computer. I got a car.
Nope...
You mean... they remember some of there schooling from back in the day and impart it on their students in non-subject matter as part of typical human conversation?
Man... why do people find the education system so difficult to understand, you're responsible for the kids these institutions are turning out today through your ignorance and unreasonable expectations.
My best teachers specialized in one subject and... ready for this... WERE PASSIONATE ABOUT IT , that's the way to go, not cross-training.
They are already being punished...that's why they are in Alaska.
We are saving Siberia for when they kill their teachers.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
"I would of fired each one of them."
If they taught you grammar like that, I would have too.
Sigh, this sort of ignorance is rather astonishing. The average EE makes more than double what the average teacher makes.
What's more, you're only including class time there, schools don't make the lessons for their teacher nor do they do any of the grading. When you have 150 students, even just 5 minutes per student per day adds up quite quickly. It's not unusual for teachers to be at it late into the evening during the year to keep up with the demands of the job.
And we still have to deal with folks like you that have this astonishingly low opinion of us, because clearly we only work when we're at school with students, it's not like we have to prepare new lesson plans each year and grade papers.
The last high school I supported, they had the brilliant (BRILLIANT!) idea of teaching programming using Turbo Pascal. And they included the network libraries in it.
Using Novell, the school suffered an escalating fight with the kids. First they faked a login screen. then they hacked the GINA and got it installed on all the machines in the lab. Then they ran a password sniffer at boot.
Then I convinced the administration to let me use the same techniques. Installed some boot time code to catch these nasties, searched and found the source code, and identified the miscreants. We applauded their efforts, hired one on as a part-time assistant, and warned the others that future incidents would result in escalating punishments. One did get back into school, but the others were banned from the lab for their junior year.
Next semester we deployed ZenWorks, images, and a lot of policies. No matter how they tried, if a station was logged in with a staff ID, the screen bakcground was red. Easy to spot.
Pretty talented kids. Their escapades getting browser access kept me busy for a few weeks. Fun times.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm in year 10 of being a teacher, I have a math degree, a music education degree, a masters in instructional technology with certifications in math, music, physics and technology in multiple states. I've had fellowships at Intel, and WestEd. I make 58k per year on 186 work days officially. I have no clue where you got 90k as teacher's salary because my district, and most in the area do not even top out at 90k.
I think you're delusional in other ways as well. It's not uncommon for people to both cling to a single example of knowing better than a teacher to talk about how much smarter they are, ignoring another 12 years of times they didn't know better as well as blaming their own misconceptions on teachers giving incorect information. After I left my PhD math program (admittetly, I wasn't good enough, so if you want to crush me for not being very smart, you can do it there) I went to teach high school and promptly completely botched order of operations in Algebra class since it had been something like 10 years since I had to even think about working with numbers. I'm sure some of those kids are out there today saying "Remember that STUPID teacher we had who couldn't even do order of operations?", while others certainly remember better our use of trebuchets and catapults to measure and learn about projectile motion as an application of quadratics. The point being, you sometimes remember things how you want to remember them, and I'd venture it's more about how much you liked the teacher personally than how good or bad the quality of instruction was.