Banged-up Brit hacker hacks into his OWN PRISON'S 'MAINFRAME' A UK hacker behind bars for computer fraud hacked into his prison's computer system during an IT lesson. Nicholas Webber, 21, of Southsea, Hampshire, was able to access the network after being allowed to join the jail's technology classes. Webber was sent down for five years in May 2011 for masterminding the infamous …
Or the standard US prison job job of license-plate making - which is particularly poetic in the case of New Hampshire, which has its state motto on the plates: "Live Free Or Die".
Unfortunately I'm not sure they ever had their inmates making license plates.
They did, however, haul a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses to court for covering up 'or die' on his plates - it went to the Supreme Court before being thrown out for obvious reasons. The phenomenal irony of legally compelling someone to display a state philosophy with which he disagrees was apparently lost on the local prosecutors.
Actually, a bit of tape could make some nice modifications to that phrase...
LIVE FREE OR DIE
For existentialists:
LIVE OR DIE
For ER nurses:
IV OR DIE
For advocates of browser choice (with a partial letter cover-up):
F F OR IE
Yeah, yeah. I'll be here all week.
For those questioning how dumb the kid was for even trying to hack the prisons computer system: he is 21. That isn't exactly an age known for good judgement. And certainly not one known for thinking about consequences before jumping in.
Personally I'd like to know what constitutes "hacking" in this case. Did he use someone else's password? Although I'm not entirely sure why any training system would bother with user accounts or passwords. They should be stand alone machines as teaching an inmate how to do word processing or excel would be a much better skill than trying to learn any kind of mainframe interface.
Honestly, I'd say that blame fully falls on whoever set up a system in which anything worthwhile at all might even be remotely accessible via the training machines. That shows a distressigly high level of dereliction of duty.
This is a case of those really responciple for the HMP Isis computer shifting the blame onto an outside IT contractor. As in who in their right minds let criminals loose on a computer and don't expect it to be hacked. Lets deflect attention from this ...
"During the five day inspection, the fingerprint-based roll call systema broke every day."
I visited an open prison nearly thirty years ago where some interesting foliage was being grown in the greenhouses. It was seen as a good way to keep the prisoners nice and placid, so a blind eye was unofficially turned. The place was full of small time smugglers who'd been caught by customs, so not really the sort of place that was hard to manage.
In the grand tradition of putting the right lag in the wrong position, I know a a garden shed chemist who used his prison time to get an open university degree in...you guessed it.
I also know a guy who did a few years for money laundering for an ecstasy importer, who got his qualifications at her majesty's pleasure. He now makes a very decent (and honest) living doing tax avoidance wheezes.
The mastermind convict who effortlessly hacks his prison computer - and eventually penetrates all sorts of government and law-enforcement systems to remove his own records and falsely incriminate others? It's all there in the Inspector Morse episode "Masonic Mysteries" (highly recommended if you haven't seen it).
In case you're still in any doubt, the common factor isn't a lack of IT security. It's the twits who are put in charge of the computers.
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