12mo ago

A lesson in Input Validation

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Oh this reminds me when people discovered all the printers at school were available on the WiFi
- That's incredible.
  Then again, school IT jobs are often given to "my nephew who is good with computers", because the pay is often half compared to the private sector.
  
  One teacher told us that once an IT technician at our school built the network, connecting 2 school institutions with ~7 buildings using only hubs. That network was apparently almost unusably slow, which isn't surprising.
  
  Do what you can with what you have...
  
  I have a friend that does IT/networking for a school district and he makes bank, YMMV.
  
  My brother works for a school with 200 kids PreK-12. He's a teacher, but he also does IT. He gets a $500/yr stipend, and he calls me at least twice a week with basic questions that are solved 95% of the time by rebooting the computer.
  I've told him a number of times the district owes me that stipend lol
  
  $500 a year?!? Hey buddy, thanks for looking after our IT systems, here's an extra $1.50 a week ...
  
  That's ridiculous!
  I'm surprised it's not a student ran IT Club that the kids have a pay a materials fee for...
- And not just printers. There may or may not also be a few Wi-Fi APs with login details admin:admin. And there also may or may not be many computers with RDP enabled without password. And those that have some password may or may not re-use the same short password for Administrator account. There also may or may not be SMTP server, though unfortunately in my case it doesn't allow using it so send e-mails outside the network. It returns "Relay access denied" error.
- If it makes you feel any better, before the days of ubiquitous wi-fi, printers on wired networks in my school were about as easy to discover and use from a distance. FTPing a text file to one would start a print job for that file and it would be trivial to mash together that information plus a list of printer addresses for the entire district network (courtesy of nmap).
  This information was certainly never put to use.
- My school had a level of security on their printers..........and also a shitload of hackers. Like, the IT department was reporting vulnerabilities discovered by the students to Apple amount of hackers.
  
  My high school had a level of security too. The same password on every work computer in the school.
  Amazingly, I never resorted to changing grades. However logging into the admin account to play games instead of the 1,358th typing class was definitely on the menu.
  
  I know that school, they have a pool on the roof.
  
  Not the one unfortunately but wouldn't surprise me if multiple groups of high schoolers over the years and across the country have been blowing holes in MacOS's security.

72 comments