Jim Deletes the tenth Grade
Occurred: Spring 2000

An idle mind is the devil’s workshop. I’ve always felt a connection with this proverb. There’s a curiosity in me that wants to try something just to see what the outcome will be. When this trait is combined with knowledge and persistence great results can occur. When it is combined with a fully stocked lab room and a substitute teacher it can be a dangerous situation.

I was in my 9th period Methods in Research class, an advanced science and research based elective course. This class was reserved for all the top science students in the school. We were expected to propose a unique experiment and work on it. A group of students in our class achieved national recognition for an antibiotic they discovered.

My project was far less impressive. I was cutting up planaria and feeding them to other planaria. Being in the class was more of an excuse to flirt with hot nerdy science chicks and play with every chemical in the lab I could get my grubby fingers on.

One day we had a substitute teacher. Usually when a substitute teacher teaches a class the regular teacher leaves behind a lesson plan to follow. If there is no lesson plan the substitute usually gives the class a free study period. Since this class was based on personal projects the substitute was left with instructions to pretty much let us do whatever we wanted. She wrote her name on the whiteboard and started reading a romance novel. I began my first experiment for the day.

I went through the checklist: Matches, long rubber tube, large pan, Dove soap, water, glycerol, funnel, yardstick, and methane gas.

Methane bubbles are a great source of fun. It’s quite simple. Mix the glycerol (not to be confused with glycerin), Dove soap, and water in a large pan. Attach the rubber tube to the gas line and attach the funnel to the open end of the tube. Dip the funnel in the soap solution, lift funnel and turn on the gas. With a little finesse you’ll have a floating bubble of methane. Attach the match to the end of yardstick. Ignite and poke bubble.

BOOOM!

The substitute teacher dropped her book and asked me what the hell I was doing. Wearing a white lab coat and safety goggles I assured her this was part of my experimental protocol. I told her I did this all the time and it was in fact quite safe. After popping a few more of these bad boys I became bored. It was time to move onto the room’s computer.

Our regular teacher knew to always keep an eye on me when I was using the room’s computer. I was always talking about how bad the schools network was and on a few occasions I had gotten into faculty accounts and broadcasted system wide messages to every computer on the network. Our female gym teacher had professed her love for women a few times. Our current substitute was relieved to see me switch from creating giant balls of fire to quietly sitting at the computer in the back of class. Looking back I feel bad for her.

Our school’s network was using an ancient version of Novell Netware and mostly windows 95/98 machines. If you poked around enough you could find a lot of network utilities hiding in various network shares. The machines were locked down using Fortress and access was very limited. I was able to get access to a dos prompt through Internet Explorer and had previously installed a copy of XTREE into my network share.

Slowly and methodically traversing the network over the past year and half I had found a few useful applications. I found login.exe, logout.exe, and setpass.exe. Accessing these applications with the correct parameters allowed me to become invisible on the network, steal other accounts and swap users mid-session without having to log out of windows. I also found a legacy user administration program. The program had the ability to edit user accounts, groups, and domains. The only problem was that I could not get an account with network administration rights. Without the proper rights the administration program was useless.

Having no supervision I began to browse areas of the network I had never been able to look at before. I found that an additional network existed for our middle school located down the road. I also noticed that our network and the middle school network shared many of the same servers, but not all of them. It seemed that users for both schools were stored on one server but then authenticated and mapped to separate servers based on the origin of the account. On a whim I decided to try to login to the high school’s server with a middle school account name.

At the beginning of the year all students were issued user accounts for the school’s network. Default account names were the first letter of your first name and then your last name (JBastard ^_^). Default passwords were birth dates in ‘mmddyyyy’ format. You were expected to change your password, but most users didn’t. My friend Hotdog Man was in this class with me. His younger sister happened to attend the middle school. After getting her birthday I attempted to log into the high school’s server.

That’s strange - it worked.

Hey, it looks like the login script got messed up? Wait a minute, why is my account flagged as administrator? It must be a mistake; let’s see if I can create another account.

Now I’ve never claimed to be a hacker and I don’t think I ever will. Sometimes with enough persistence you get lucky. An unexpected result occurs. Not good, not bad, just unexpected behavior.

Account ‘JBobbit’ created, password ‘dickchop’. I wonder if I can set the permissions for the account I just created…. Hey Hotdog Man, check it out. I’m a system administrator!

After a year and a half I’d finally done it. The school network had a new owner and his name was Jim Bastard. Since I was still a young bastard, I lacked the discipline of control. Breaking into your first major system is a life changing experience. I was overjoyed. The network that had tried to restrict my every move had been One hundred percent compromised. Only one thought came to my mind: Let’s start deleting accounts. I fired up the legacy network administration program. A few moments later the network was missing the entire tenth grade. It seems I had deleted everyone in my class.

I created a few fake administrator accounts in the other grades so I would still have root access whenever I wanted. The only account left in the tenth grade was JBobbit. Knowing that the system administrator would see this I created three more accounts.

hahaha_koolaid_man
jbobbit_strikes_again
we_killed_network

My classmate Bono started hovering around Hotdog Man and me. He wanted to get on the computer to do genuine research for his project. Bono was smart and a teacher’s pet. If he caught a whiff of what was going on he would probably narc us out.

I did a hard reset on the machine before Bono noticed what was on the monitor, “It just froze up on me. Anyway, I’m done. It’s all yours”. Hotdog Man and I went back to exploding methane bubbles.

Ten minutes later, the loudspeaker crackles, “Attention Teachers.” I could hear the message echoing down the hallways and coming from the other classrooms. It was being broadcasted to the entire school. “Teachers, please stop all students from computer usage at this time. All students are to stop using the school’s computers immediately.”

I know this announcement had to do with my recent activities but I keep my cool. I continue popping methane bubbles. I’m a bit surprised about the swift response time. It’s 2:10pm. With only fifteen more minutes of school I thought I wouldn’t hear about any of this until tomorrow.

Out of nowhere the principal, vice principal, and network administrator (a glorified secretary not to be confused with the system administrator, koolaid man) storm into the classroom. I’m wearing a lab coat and safety goggles laboring over a beaker of soap solution. I turn the methane gas off.

The group focuses on Bono who is still sitting at the computer terminal. He had stopped using the computer the moment of the announcement but had still not gotten up out of the chair. The network administrator sharply eyed the substitute who was still reading her romance novel. The network administrator barked at the substitute, “Who was using that computer!” The substitute looks up from her book for the first time in thirty minutes and calmly says “Oh, he was.” as she points to Bono. I can clearly see fear radiating from Bono. His entire body flinches as his eyes shoot wide open and his shoulders raise towards his neck. He has a vision of getting expelled from school, not making it into Harvey Mudd and becoming a dishwasher. I think I see his knees buckle. Bono tries to defend himself but is too distraught. He begins to choke on his words and can’t form a coherent sentence. The vice principal speaks up, “Bono please come with us.” Bono leaves the room with the principal, vice principal, and the network administrator.

I go home.

The next day at school the entire network is down for maintenance. All school projects have been granted a one-week extension. No one says anything to me. The weekend rolls by and on Monday everything is back to normal. All user accounts have been recreated and all lost files were restored from backups. Hotdog Man and I go to our Methods in Research class. Our regular teacher is back. She knows we are trouble. She knows if anything went wrong we probably had something to do with it. She speaks to us in a low raspy voice, “Mr. Gauss wants to see you two in his office. Now.”

Mr. Gauss was the Kool-Aid man. He taught a few chemistry classes at the school but spent most of his time being the system administrator for the school district’s computers and networks. His office resided in an old boy’s bathroom. The room had never been remade into a proper office. He had brand new computer gear, stacks of manuals, toilets, urinals, and a sink. Hotdog Man and I knocked on the door. It still had a little picture of a man on the outside indicating it was a boy’s bathroom. Many students never knew this was an office, they just assumed it was a bathroom that was always locked.

Mr. Gauss opened the door. He stood six foot two and at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He was big. There was barely enough room for us to fit in his tiny bathroom office. Gauss sat down at his chair and we stood cramped between laser jet printers, a bookshelf filled with boxes of software, and a urinal.

Gauss candidly spoke up, “Listen boys. I know you did it. You know, it cost us twelve thousand dollars to bring in consultants to restore all the data you deleted.”

Hotdog Man didn’t speak a word. I nervously broke the silence, “We really have no idea what you are talking about.”

Gauss responded back, “We know you were near the computer that the accounts were deleted from around the time it happened. I can’t prove it, but I know that you did it Jim.”

I detect an air of admiration coming from Gauss. Although he is slightly annoyed, I get the feeling he is impressed with the feat we have accomplished. I don’t think he is trying to throw the book at us. Hotdog Man picks up on this as well and finally speaks, “I’m sorry Mr. Gauss, but we have no idea what you are talking about.”

Gauss looks us both over a few times and laughs,“Okay boys, get out of here.”

Hotdog Man and I leave the bathroom office and go back to class.