Tag Archive for: Broke

Hacker Recounts How He Once Broke Into Professor’s Computer to Submit Late Assignment

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Hacker Recounts How He Once Broke Into Professor’s Computer to Submit Late Assignment

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Hacker Recounts How He Once Broke Into Professor’s Computer to Submit Late Assignment

When you miss your assignment deadline by just two or four hours, you wish you could go back in time and submit your assignment before the limit –something which seems impossible. Turns out, it was not that hard for college student Robert Graham, who is now a well-known cybersecurity researcher. Talking to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in an episode of My First Hack series by Vice’s Cyber podcast, Graham shared an anecdote from his college when he hacked his professor’s computer to submit his late assignment in time.

Graham recollects that once when he was too late in submitting his assignment by a midnight deadline, he changed his computer’s date so that the timestamp on the assignment reads of an earlier time than it was actually submitted. But it was not long before the teachers became aware of this trickery students used. To make sure that assignments were actually assigned on time, teachers made it mandatory for students to send the assignment by email.

E-mails contain a piece of information called a header which cannot be modified. An email header contains information like sender, receiver, sent timestamp, received timestamp and other information. At this point, Graham’s trick to backdate his own computer and push the submission timestamp back in time would not work because as per his professor’s instructions, the received timestamp would be considered as the assignment submission time. When the deadline passed, and as usual Graham was late — this time by four hours –he had to have to get around this.

The university ran a Unix-based university environment, and the emails arrived on the professor’s computer rather than being on the cloud. Interestingly, Graham found a way. Around 4 am, “I grabbed a script for an exploit and ran it against their system,” says Graham on the podcast. Once the exploit gave him access to his professor’s computer, he changed the timestamp to match his assignment submission time, and once his email was received, he changed the timestamps back again.

Years later, Graham is now a noted cybersecurity researcher….

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What we know about Alaska’s cybersecurity after hackers broke through multiple state agencies this year

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A screenshot shows how the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services’ website remains offline a month after hackers first targeted the agency’s networks.

For weeks this spring, hackers forced officials to shut down Alaska’s Courtview system, making state court records inaccessible to attorneys, people charged with crimes, and residents seeking to run background checks on their prospective dates or tenants.

Then, cyberattackers targeted the state health department, whose website has remained offline since the hackers were first discovered in mid-May.

State officials have revealed few specifics about the attacks — particularly about the one that targeted the health department. They’ve also declined to release many details about the cyberdefenses they use to protect Alaska’s computer systems, and how they plan to adapt them to ensure that future attacks are less disruptive.

While there are still many unanswered questions, here’s what we know — and what we don’t.

Who broke into the computer systems of Alaska’s court system and health department, and how did they do it?

These are the most obvious questions about the cyberattacks — and we don’t have answers to them. The health department, in a statement from spokesman Clinton Bennett, said it’s not releasing information “regarding the type of cyberattack, how the cyberattack occurred or other specific information.”

The court system’s top spokesman, Chief Justice Joel Bolger, has said a half-dozen computers were infected with malware that was trying to allow “outside actors” to move around the agency’s network. But in an interview Wednesday, he said those actors were never identified.

“We did not receive any direct communication from them,” he said.

Bolger said the unusual activity on the agency’s network was detected in late April by “cybersecurity notification software,” and that it was identified at an “early stage, before any of our computers had been taken over, locked up, encrypted — none of that stuff happened.” Two days after the discovery, the court system took its computer networks offline, to cut off the attackers’ access.

Bolger declined to say exactly how the…

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China-Backed Hackers Broke Into 100 Firms and Agencies, U.S. Says – The New York Times

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  1. China-Backed Hackers Broke Into 100 Firms and Agencies, U.S. Says  The New York Times
  2. Feds Charge Chinese Hackers With Ripping Off Video Game Loot From 9 Companies  WIRED
  3. DOJ Charges Chinese Nationals With Hacking More Than 100 Companies  NPR
  4. Chinese and Malaysian hackers charged by US over attacks  BBC News
  5. U.S. Charges Chinese Nationals in Cyberattacks on More Than 100 Companies  The Wall Street Journal
  6. View Full Coverage on read more

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How a hacker’s mom broke into prison—and the warden’s computer

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The Microsoft Word document was tainted with a malicious macro. When the prison boss clicked, he inadvertently gave Black Hills access to his computer. “We were just dumbfounded,” Strand says. “It was …
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