That time I hacked my school's network

I guess some time after I left high school

To be clear, while I was a massive nerd in high school, I wasn’t like a hacker at all. What I did was, I opened Network Neighbourhood and clicked around a bit.

So, my school gave every student and teacher an account on the network, and it came with a personal “M:\” drive we could store our work in. And I found them. Just like, hanging out in Network Neighbourhood where anyone could see it. Not imagining there’d be anything worth spying on in there, I reported it to a teacher and they fixed it.

Kind of.

I mean, they hid all the icons. Now if I wanted to look at anyone’s drive I had to type in the network address manually (which was just //home/$username, or something like that). This was still not terribly exciting to me, so I reported that too and they fixed it properly this time. From that point on, the only way I could see someone’s private files was if I had their password.

That was when I found the big file with everyone’s password in it.

Apparently, when the network had been set up, all the accounts had been generated with a big batch file that ran some “create account” command and passed in the display name, user name and password for each new account. And this batch file had been left in a folder on the main shared drive that anyone could access.

Someone in my computer science class had asked about changing account passwords a few months prior, so the six of us in that class had the “change password” permission (why can that even be turned off??) but everyone else — at least all the other students — didn’t even have the option to use a password other than the one in that file.

I don’t think I bothered reporting that one. I can only assume they’d have deleted the files and then just printed out everyone’s data and left it in a box in the middle of the main hall at lunchtime.