Free Hack by Peter Wrenshall Page B

without any success. Then Logan, noticing the conversation, said, “Excuse me,” to the boy who was talking to Zaqarwi. Just before he went silent, Zaqarwi’s companion said, “Gameworld on Saturday.”
    I made a mental note of that.
    When Logan was busy lecturing again, I quietly placed my memory stick into the computer’s port. Had they locked the port down to prevent it being used for transferring data to memory sticks? Maybe not. School system administrators are usually far too busy to follow all the security precautions that they would do in an ideal world.
    I powered down the machine, and rebooted it from the memory stick, instead of Windows. Then I ran a program to dump the logon cache to the stick. That gave me a list of the last ten users to log on at that machine. That would include Logan’s username and password from the previous session. Of course, they were in encrypted form. But I had plenty of time to crack that. With the list safely on the memory stick, I turned off the machine, rebooted to Windows, and logged on. I typed in the assignment within a minute. It took another five minutes for the rest of the class to finish.
    “Well done, David,” said Logan, as he passed by, checking on progress.
    During the previous class session, he had done that after each assignment. That gave me in the region of ten minutes to do my own work.
    After Logan wandered off, I opened the Windows file manager, navigated to my hacker tools directory, and got to work, using a tool for finding network devices.
    Within a few minutes, I had discovered the sorry truth—that the school’s network server was running an old (cheaper and less secure) version of Windows Server. In addition, the domain controller was called ‘DC,’ the mail server was called ‘mail,’ the web server was called ‘web1,’ and the dial-in server was called ‘RAS.’
    This was too easy. I actually prefer a challenge. There are hackers, and there are crackers. Computer hackers like to write programs to solve the most difficult technical problems they can find. Computer crackers like to write programs to break into the most secure systems they can find. Somehow, I managed to be both. It didn't matter to me what the challenge was, hacking or cracking. As long as the contest lasted, so did my interest. When it was like this, I got bored.
    I checked the time. It was nearly the end of class. I opened a DOS box, and checked my machine’s network address. The network administrator had opted to use static IP addressing, for some reason, and the last digits of the IP were the same as the asset tag on the machine. I wandered over to Logan, and asked him a made-up question. When he finished giving me the answer, I sneaked a look at the asset tag of the whiteboard.
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    Back at my computer, I pinged the whiteboard, and it replied. It didn’t take much longer to hijack the remote control service. Now to make myself known to Zaqarwi. I put the whiteboard cursor in the middle of the board, and typed: “Logan’s Lectures: A Cure for Insomnia?”
    I heard a couple of giggles from students who had been looking up at the front of the room at the time. I quickly deleted the text before Logan looked up. He gave a girl at the back of the class a nasty stare, and she put her hand over her mouth. Very quickly, I discreetly looked over at Zaqarwi, who appeared to have noticed what happened.
    Now that I had his attention, I again put the cursor in the middle of the board, and typed “Elmwood High School: Teaching Children How to Become Bureaucrats Since 1897,” and then quickly deleted it.
    There was widespread laughter. This time, Logan’s cold stare could do nothing about it. A minute later, the bell sounded, and everybody got up to go. I stood up, turned, and nearly walked into someone.
    “Excuse me,” said Zaqarwi, with a heavy accent.
    “Sorry,” I said. I tried to make eye contact with him, without overdoing it. But he walked past, without any more comment.