Ask HN: My 13 year-old cousin hacked into his school's system. What advice would you give?
My 13 year-old cousin hacked into his school's computer system. He didn't do any major damage, but I want to make sure he knows why what he did was wrong and show him ways in which he can use his talent to make a positive impact on the world. What is the best way to approach him? Are there any good articles / books I can recommend to him?
73 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadApparently it was actually a rule in the rulebook that you arent allowed to use the command line because you can do 'great damage'. On most computers it was disabled, but this was computer science class and we wrote console applications in c++ (through visual studio ide) so it had to be enabled.
They called my mom, who isn't very computer savvy, and told her that I was 'hacking'. She was so mad at me. I got 1 detention and had to write a handwritten note of apology. It was a pretty bad experience overall.
They wanted to suspend me for two days for that one. Happily, I was able to get another teacher to talk to the principal and explain that computers is "his thing" and that just because it was possible that I knew how to do something doesn't mean that I did do it.
There is lots of productive work to be done in "breaking" systems. Nobody thinks Arjen Lenstra or Paul Kocher are doing work of a lesser caliber than Alan Cox; it is (I think obviously) harder to break RSA than it is to build a new Linux virtual filesystem layer. It is only because people like ESR don't know about people like Paul Kocher that this "build vs. break" meme spreads. Let's try to kill it when it appears.
What teenagers need to have is a sense of ethics. This has nothing to do with whether you spend your time finding holes in things, and everything to do with respecting property, with not assuming that you know the impact of every action you take that invades someone else's property, and hopefully with having a productive goal.
Here's what you need to tell your cousin: nobody in the real world gives a shit about your ability to break into one computer system. Per-host network penetration testing is close to the bottom rung of the computer security career ladder. If he likes breaking things, what he should do is start picking up open source software, researching how it works, finding vulnerabilities, and reporting them.
He's going to find really quickly that knowing you could --- if you were a criminal and a moron --- break into tens of thousands of computer systems is a lot more fun than breaking into one badly-configured school computer. He's also going to learn real computer science, because really breaking systems involves really reading and understanding code, runtimes, layering, information modeling and representation, and any of a zillion other things.
Computer security is a really awesome tour of a lot of the fun stuff in a CS curricula. I've worked on compilers, crypto math, distributed commit protocols, filesystems, and language runtimes in just the last 12 months. If he likes this stuff, get him to stay with it.
You asked for books. How about:
* The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (bad title, great book).
* Eldad Eilam's "Reversing"
* The Art Of Software Security Assessment (our industry's bible)
* The Shellcoder's Handbook
* The last 10 years of Black Hat Briefings talks, which are all available online.
The phrase that stands out most upon first glance is this:
Similarly, to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.
If you aren't the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you'll need to become one in order to make it as a hacker. Otherwise you'll find your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.
I've found this not to be the case. Wanting sex, money, and social approval is not necessarily detrimental. Similarly, I get no thrill from solving problems per se. I don't think that that thrill is a necessity for hackers. Raymond uses too broad a brush.
I don't have a lot of the traits that go alongside hackers, either. Coding languages don't fascinate me, by-and-large. When I look at a language, I figure out exactly how to get things done and then I don't look at it again. As a result, I don't find much fascination in discussions about programming, which is rare among hackers.
That might both give him some new ideas, as well as show who is really considered important. For example, I always thought lcamtuf (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/) is a great example of a hacker of many skills (photography, network security, fuzzing, constructing robots with own 3d printer and many more random ideas). I guess you just don't have time to be a script kiddie if you have enough good ideas of your own...
Just make sure he finds securityfocus before he finds cDc :)
On the other hand you could let him know, that notifying the school officially about the security problem may be a bad idea. Typical teachers are as likely to say "thanks", as "OMG hacker! security audit to make sure you didn't change any data will cost X$/h - your parents are paying for it and you're suspended".
He shouldn't have been able to do it anyway. Compare it to a kid kicking against a fence and finding out that it swings open.
Simply explain that if you have no business in a system that you should not try to gain access, that should be plenty.
Do you take offense at my suggestion this kid did nothing wrong ? Why is that ? Enlighten me, for all I have read above the sysadmin is the person in the wrong, if a 13 year old can walk all over your system you ought to be looking for a job (and one that does not include system administration).
What do you mean he didn't do anything wrong? If all he did was find a way into their systems and report his findings of insecurity or something, certainly there would be nothing wrong with that (as long as he's following his terms of use for the school computers, also -- he's held to the rules of the school as a student). But it appears as if he's done something, maybe he didn't report what he discovered, that is indeed wrong.
And I agree, the sysadmin must be pretty incompetent, but that is still no reason to be doing that. It's like saying "the lock on this safe is weak and easily broken, so I will go ahead and break it to access the contents inside." It's still a safe, you're still not supposed to break it. If you do, you should immediately recommend to the owner that they get a stronger lock.
He's a typical (in a sense) 13 year old. This hardly warrants punishment. But he should indeed put his talents to better use, and that's what the author of this thread is asking. What would we recommend?
I'm assuming that this kid is just as curious as any other kid at that age, and the systems should be set up accordingly.
This is trying to close the gate after the horse has bolted, ok, so he looked, big deal. Now catch up on the educational bit about privacy and minding your own business, case closed.
No need to make an issue out of it. The overreaction in these cases does more damage than the event itself.
So, no that does not make it legal.
BUT We're talking about a kid that is according to the OP 13 years old, at that age you are not considered to be able to make these judgement calls.
Forbidden fruit and all that...
Certainly, I don't advocate anything more than the OP does. This strikes me as one of those "teachable moments" that will help the kid make these sorts of judgment calls in the future.
It's up to the adults to help kids make the right judgement calls, so in this case I see it as failed parenting / eduction, not a failure on the part of the kid.
Fully agree with you on the 'teachable moment' thing, opportunities like that come by too little anyway.
The fact that an extended family member is asking about this on a public message board already makes me worried this has gotten way too big in comparison to the infraction.
As far as failed parenting...hmmm...I wouldn't go that far. Kids will make poor choices, no matter how great the parenting. I think we need to abstain from judging that without more details.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
I could do the same. I also read SICP when I was 13.
ADHD to me is just a convenient label for kids that are different than that norm, so we trot out the medicine cabinet to make them conform instead of helping them to cope with the world around them we make it easier for the 'rest' to cope with them.
My friend and I have similar personalities, and my grades were similarly hit-and-miss. I went home and asked my mother if I had ADD. Her response: "Probably."
I'm grateful that I had parents who accepted my quirks as a part of my personality and not as problems to be fixed.
I'm 43 now, 44 in March, when I was a kid ADD did not yet 'exist', and from my experience with my sons teachers the teachers in the schools that I went to were of a better grade than the teachers he has to content with (and that have to contend with him) today.
I think the latter is the biggest factor in the diagnosis of all these 'children that we can't handle', it is striking that the %age of these kids seems to go up with every generation. Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach.
To some extent I think it is the influence of our media rich world, and next to that probably the enormous amount of technology and information available to kids from a very young age onwards that causes kids to be so tremendously fast at the stuff that these teachers can barely cope with.
Boredom is their lot, unless you can get them interested, and once you manage that better hold on to your hat.
One thing I have found to be universal in dealing with 'gifted' or 'fast' children (I prefer those terms), it is that once you have gained their respect it gets a lot easier to communicate with them and to get them interested in the stuff that they should know.
It's just that if you're a teacher and you get these knowledge seeking missiles that can run rings around you your visceral response is probably to want them to slow down to your level. I think that is the best way to lose their respect.
Congratulations to your parents, they seem to have done just fine :)
As much as I would love to believe this, I'm at a college that's renowned for its teaching program, and teaching majors came to me for quite a lot of tech problems. (Two didn't understand basic algebra - worrysome.) The problem is that people who decide they want to become teachers very rarely work well as teachers. My favorite teachers were all passionate about their subject first and foremost: many of them, even in high school, committed to their work outside of just teaching. The people who say "I want to teach and I don't care what" are very often the most problematic teachers.
I agree with you entirely about how enormous the world of media has become. That's part of the problem. There are so many things to pay attention to that the slow pace of the average classroom doesn't have enough to appeal to students. With the exception of perhaps three teachers' classes, I learned more online than I ever did in a class. (The solution is to develop teachers who are more singularly fascinating than the Internet, which is a difficult challenge.)
That had me chuckling out loud. I think we'll see a certain game program for sale before that will happen.
Later, he was the reason I befriended a kid I'd been at odds with for years, an arrogant film buff. When we started to have extended discussions covering literature, cinema, and music, I started looking for some of the films they were mentioning, and in doing so became close friends with the film kid. It led to one of the best summers of my life, driving around the state in his Wrangler to get a copy of Spaced.
(Meanwhile, the class we met in was a half-year course filled with a ton of kids with short attention spans, and he managed to get us to read something like 7-8 books and a ton of short stories, and crammed us with 5 excellent films in between.)
How you isolate people like that and identify them, I don't know. They exist, though.
(Game program? What do you mean?)
Identifying people like that really would be a mission worth undertaking, food for thought there.
The game reference is a /. meme reference about 'duke nukem forever', a game that has been in production since '97. The running gag is which will come first: hell freezes over, duke nukem forever is released or the Hurd is finished.
My money is on hell to freeze over :)
lemme tell you, it was wildly effective. so much so that ADD didn't even exist until they started doing away with the practice...
Also, I greatly enjoyed reading iWoz and it is be very accessible for a teenager. Woz' passion is very contagious and it may help him discover how fun constructive hacking is.
if you fear he will make mistakes, the best way to combat that is with knowledge, not by taking the school's side against him and calling his great success immoral.
Then one day my teacher switched places with the only other person who had the admin password, and she didn't know about what I had been doing. When she found out that I had administrator access, she was infuriated. She called me a "hacker" and reported me to the principal. The principal planned to give me a 0 in the class and possibly expel me from school. The only people who were allowed to be in the "hearing" which decided my fate was the pissed off teacher and the principal. The administrator, who vouched for me, was told that no one asked for his opinion and that it wasn't relevant. I almost failed to graduate because of this, and it was only through being persistent and involving every teacher I knew that I managed to not fail (the principal reduced my grade to 75/100 instead of failing me).
I would tell your son that most adults who have authority (including principals, teachers, judges and police officers) do not understand technology and computers very well, and therefore it's important to not only operate within the scope of the law and rules of his school, but to also not even appear to operate outside those rules. Computers are cheap, and in 2009 there's not much more interesting in his school's network than what he can set up on a $200 netbook.
I see this as a response to some kind of inner fear that there are kids out there that are more competent with this stuff than the adults. Invariably it's the clueless that start these witch-hunts.
What worries me the most is that his parents and school are pretty much as described in some of these comments - scared of what they don't understand. I've spoken with the parents and done my best to let them know that this is bad, yes, but not something to be punished. This kid really has a gift. I can understand their concerns, however, when he (as a 13 year old) is so sure of his talent that he considers academics unimportant.
Now that I think of it, if there is any recommended reading for the PARENTS of budding hackers? If not, that might be a good idea for someone out there...
Holy cow, so you mean this doesn't just work in the movies, but in real life, too?
It's funny that this story starts with this similar point.
That was about five years ago. Today I am usually always at odds with the teachers. Either I can't sit still, I'm too quirky or snappy, or whatever the teachers want to make up. Then their computer acts up. Perfect opportunity. I go over and fix the simple problem and they now regard me as a demigod and no longer hate me.
That's how I fix my relationships with my teachers.
An alternative would be to talk to the school and see if they could give him some sort of credit for helping administer the network, or work on a special project for the school.
To give you an anecdote: in high school (and this was only a few years ago), me and my friends consistently were cracking passwords and breaking into various parts of our school's network. We never did anything harmful, nor did we ever cheat, but we did it for the fun and the challenge. One day, we happened to find a file containing all the passwords to every user on the network -- teachers, guidance counselors, and principal included -- and we turned it into the principal. Instead of telling us we were wrong for "hacking the network" and questioning us, he thanked us profusely and got the file deleted from the network. No punishment.
In middle school, however, I got in minor trouble for "hacking" by using proxies to skirt around the school's filtering system. The "techs" in the computer lab quite literally pulled me out of class and angrily questioned me, telling me how I was wrong and what I did was bad. What happened? I continued doing it, and just made sure not to be caught.
My point is that telling him he is wrong will not stop him, and he will likely continue what he is doing because it stimulates him and he finds it exciting. By nurturing that excitement and funneling it into something constructive, such as an alternative project, he will learn what the better avenues are and likely forget about "hacking"/cracking almost (if not) completely.
Also, remember, embarrassing them in this way might cause them to use the great power they have over you to make your life miserable as well. It goes both ways. The luddites in charge of public schools are usually docile, slow moving creatures, but they can become suddenly fierce if poked in the eye with a sharp stick.
See if there is any way you can spin this toward the "good", by possibly having a meeting with the schools principal and systems admin. This is obviously a crap shoot, but could possibly be beneficial to your son's education.
Don't try to do funny stuff on a school's network from within the school. You are outgunned from the very start.
Whether he gets caught or not, this strikes me as a good lesson to learn before he's 18.
Indeed -- I suspect the proportion of criminals who were caught because they bragged to their friends is quite high.
here's one example, a quick google search - 69 felonies for stealing tests and changing grades http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38012/118/
Also, even though he got in, I wouldn't attempt to notify them of their breach, because again the school will probably go ballistic on him, I think there was a news story about this, but what happened escapes me.
If he's messing with financial systems or other serious stuff, give him a thwock on the skull and remind him that it would be unfair and immoral to screw with the systems more than the CEOs and bankers already have. =)
I cannot comment on ethics though, or parrenting. Both of my parrents were computer scientists at one time in there carreer, and I still bounce Ideas off of my father. Personaly, I think this is the best way to grow up with such a skill set. my only regret is that I have not had much motivation to hack when I can have a rely interesting discussion with my father.
1) Get him a new computer (but with a crappy video card, if he's into gaming)
2) Find him programming internships and introduce him to programmers you know
I would also add:
Tell him that he isn't a real programmer unless he understands Prolog, Haskell, C, and a flavor of Lisp (Scheme/Arc), although Python might be a good first language to start with. Be prepared to spend lots of $ on books - all of these topics have books which work for different people. I would recommend:
The Little Schemer series: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/ and Programming in Haskell http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html
These are solidly good books, there are others, but they really depend on personality.
I often thing, personallly, that whilst reading books/articles is good it doesn't help instill a lot into a young hacker.
First I would buy him Kevin Mitnicks books. I recommend them to every new hacker because: a) some of the stories are unbelievably inspiring! b) it's all real life stuff c) he manages to tell the stories of these great hacks without glamourising the illegality. It does a lot to prove hacking can be great fun within legal bounds.
The next thing I would do is encourage him to get involved with a programming community. Get him to learn a language and start ot play with it. :)
in terms of cracking (as opposed to hacking) sometimes pushing the boundaries happens (either for personal reasons or professional). I would teach your cousin that breaking the law is wrong. Breaking into the schools system is (speaking technically) as bad as breaking into a microsoft server. But the impact of the 2 activities (assuming it was simply to look both times) is very different. Try to show him that experimenting with something like the school system is fairly harmless but still wrong and he should take it no further unless he has permission :) (offer the school a pen test :D)
Finally a lot of people are saying "teach him not to get caught" (essentially). This is a most important lesson. I crack for a living (White Hat I hasten to add) and one of the things that makes me good at that is paying attention to covering my actions :)