Re: The Shawshank Connection
I'm looking forward to the names of their prison memoirs:
"Hard Timesharing"
"Intel Inside"
We are impressed by five prisoners in the US who built two personal computers from parts, hid them behind a plywood board in the ceiling of a closet, and then connected those computers to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's (ODRC) network to engage in cybershenanigans. Compliments are less forthcoming from …
The quote from the report:
"They narrowed the search area down to the switch in P3 and the PC was connected to port 16. I was able to follow the cable from the switch to a closet in the small training room."
So it wasn't simply a port; they managed to run a cable directly from a switch somewhere. Maybe a comms cab in a cupboard, locked door but accessible from the ceiling? I've not had time to read the report yet but will later to see if there's clarification.
One thing I'm wondering though; how did they manage to sneak out an entire monitor or 2 on which to use said PCs? You can cobble together the other parts and sneak them in pockets (with the exception of the mainboard, but that is thin so can fit down pants). You don't need a case for the PC to run. But how did they get a screen out?
The closet was in a training room - perhaps the training used isolated computers? Convince someone the monitor was "bad", get a replacement from the recycling place, and quietly shift the "bad" monitor up into the hidden site, and convince the guards that it'd been removed already. Guards would see one working monitor per computer, no extra gear laying around, and conclude that the information was valid. Schedule it for a shift change and the guard near end of shift would see the monitor come in, but, hey, its almost time to go home, he wouldn't follow the prisoner to ensure the bad one was swapped out properly..he'd tell his replacement. Replacement comes on duty, and he's told "we took the bad one out already, you must've still been at your shift briefing", with some forged documents...they know the guard isn't going to follow up - what use would a monitor be without a computer, after all?
don't need to schedule for guard shift changes. just have something to blackmail the guard with.
I worked with a guy who was an X prison guard once. He told me about the kinds of stuff prisoners will do to the guards. One example, a prisoner begs a guard to mail something to his nephew, like a birthday card, "I want to get it to my nephew before his birthday and the prison mail system is too slow." The guard is suckered in, does a one-time favor, and mails it outside the prison. Just a simple birthday card, right? Well, it got a cancellation mark from OUTSIDE the prison on it during the mailing, and it was quietly sent BACK to the same prisoner, who now has PROOF that the guard did something that could get him fired... and the next request is "get me some booze" or "get me some drugs" or "look the other way while we XXX" because it's the guard's F'ing JOB on the line, now...
so yeah, how do prisoners get away with this stuff? Well, it's like *THAT*
One thing I'm wondering though; how did they manage to sneak out an entire monitor or 2 on which to use said PCs?
Headless systems that they could connect to from the inmate area? The systems were in a false ceiling, not a place where you would usually be able to go and sit to view a monitor. For the system in the inmate area they would initially probably needed just Putty to get to their hidden systems. And apparently they had found some of the tools they needed on disks of systems they were taking apart, so that they could bootstrap their toolkit.
Thank you, Stoneshop. Indeed, why would you park a monitor in the ceiling when you would have to sit on a ladder, or get into the ceiling, to use it?! Far more likely the remote access, or a mobe, but also consider a secret KVM cable drop from the illicit host and you use it from the keyboard, screen, and mouse of the nearby "legit" system? Guard coming, switch to the safe host, once clear, switch back. So easy and cheap.
And as to the network connection; if those are home runs from a router, then you can piggyback any number of extra hosts on that wire, no problem, other than having your MAC addr and traffic view-able from any monitoring of it, or if the connections are individually secured. It also would have been safer to host a WiFi hotspot in the overhead, with remote power or a timer to keep it offline while not in use. If not, then you could hijack two spare pairs of wires in an Ethernet run (many have four pair, but only use two), and have it double back several times in another area so you can have time to spot anyone searching for your rig via the wiring. Still, what a great hack!
At school I was taught to use an apostrophe to pluralise initialisms. I suppose it came from the now near outmoded practise of using an apostrophe to abbreviate words (although some examples are in common use, e.g. "it's" as in "it's hot today").
I'm not saying it's correct, it's just that that's what we were taught to do back then, so I have a lot of tolerance for that type of apostrophe usage.
Glad to hear somebody else who was taught about using apostrophes when pluralising capitalisations. I was taught this at school, but none of the youngsters here seem to have heard of that.
I was also taught to use full stops after each letter in an abbreviation, but this seems to be almost universally outmoded practice nowadays.
Nowadays, I would just write "PCs in the ceiling", but when I was at school I would have written "P.C.'s in the ceiling" (and then the teacher would have asked me what a PC was, because they weren't even a thing when I was at school)
Lovely...here in the states, a "Billion" is actually 1,000 million...or 1 to the 9th. On the other side of El Pondo, its 1 to the 12th, which to Americans, is a trillion...but, a trillion in the UK is..1 to the 18th, putting us further out of sync. As if we don't already argue over "color" versus "colour"?
"Lovely...here in the states, a "Billion" is actually 1,000 million...or 1 to the 9th. On the other side of El Pondo, its 1 to the 12th, which to Americans, is a trillion...but, a trillion in the UK is..1 to the 18th,"
Cough. 1 to the 9th, 1 to the 12th & 1 to the 18th are all 1.
but when I was at school I would have written "P.C.'s in the ceiling"
Incorrect. At best ambiguous - the apostrophe there is indicating the absence of the letter I.
If per se, I know a man named Peter Chris Zumble, and he likes to be called by his initials, and he is hiding in the ceiling, then "P.C.'s in the ceiling" makes sense, otherwise it does not.