Re: I have been asked to leave the company for having spotted serious

From: winged (winged_at_nofollow.com)
Date: 02/06/05 

Date: 06 Feb 2005 12:32:17 EST

Martin wrote:
> Curious George wrote:
>
>> Its not the kids. The kids are dead easy to get on board. Indeed, if
>> you take a few kids and tell them to help you check out your security,
>> you would have to put up gates. But that is not the case in schools -
>> forget about the fact that if you take a curious young mind that is
>> having problems with something like math and put them to work on
>> complex algos or something of the sort. . . doing that is akin to
>> asking them to sell coke and people would be fired. Actually, if you
>> pick up a copy of 2600 you will see a whole section dedicated to what
>> some kids go through in schools. Hell, if a kid found a security hole
>> and it were up to me, I would pin a medal on him or her. If its up to
>> school administration, they would have the kid expelled.
>
>
> Just a quicky on this one...
>
> When I was at university a group of us were a little into cracking
> rather than hacking. Combining the two was a little dangerous....
>
> Well, we didn't know what the outcome would be of a tiny little patch we
> engineered the ops to install on the mainframe (we're going back to 1989
> here). It gave us admin rights on the local mainframe, also gave us
> admin rights on every networked mainframe connected to it - the North
> West Computer Network.
>
> Anyway, we had a little play across the system, ran a few D&D games that
> kind of thing, but it kind of crashed. As in took down all the
> mainframes on the network. After a couple of weeks it was fixed and we
> had the biggest bollocking I've ever had from our Computer Centre
> manager. No we didn't get thrown off the course.
>
> The funny part was that the shift leader who was on when it all went
> pear shaped (about midnight when we usually played a little) also gave
> us a bollicking. But she said something along the lines of, ok, it was
> funny and amusing, but if you ever do anything like that again, on my
> shift, I'll castrate you! We believed her!
>
> We live and learn. Hell we were there to learn about computers and that
> was a good lesson.
>
>>
>>
We had a VMS system where if one followed a page down immediately with
an <sec> char it would drop you to Root. The flaw was across the system
but very few were aware of the vulnerability. I am not sure if they
ever got that problem fixed but it almost got me fired when I brought it
to their attention. The gods were a bit miffed at my discovery even
though I had never tried to exploit it.

Winged