Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
since there are only 3 children on Ketchikan
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.
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.
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.
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.