Throwaway account.

In high school (2010-ish), I was on the student council so I had insider access of sorts to a lot of the inner workings of the school administration. One day, during a short meeting with them, the principal told us on the council that the IT department was installing wifi for personal device use. Since we had difficulties with getting school bonds passed by voters at the time, the wifi was supposed to enable us students to bring our laptops from home and use them in the classroom (since most classrooms only had 3-4 computers, with older schools only having 1-2 computers per classroom for staff use only). Naturally, we were all on board since it would enable us to finish our schoolwork without fighting over computer space.

Fast forward two months and I notice that the wifi seemingly hasn't been installed yet. I ask the principal and was told that it was supposed to be installed and working perfectly. So I did some digging on one of the school computers. This is where I found out how the school district's IT department submitted updates.

The IT department ran an old Novell Netware server for account login, Faronics Deep Freeze on the end user machines to protect against student abuse, and a Windows network share for unattended updates. Since the Windows Netware client cannot assign local Windows permissions (or it wasn't configured properly in my case), everything inside Windows was ran with admin privileges (you were logged into Netware but ran under a local admin user account in Windows). Since Deep Freeze reverted changes to the file system on reboot, the assumption was that the students could completely wreck the install all they wanted with a simple reboot being all that was needed to effectively reset the machines to the default configuration.

This strategy worked well, but there is a huge flaw. Because you had local admin rights, you had full access to whatever resources you wanted under Windows XP Professional (the OS of choice back then). This includes the ability to install software or games (we had some epic district-wide Halo CE LAN parties), see network information (MAC address, IP octet configuration, etc), and everything else you could do to a local computer. The only caveat is that whatever changes you made would be erased on reboot. I guess the assumption with this is that the average inner city high school student wouldn't have the technical expertise to know how to read this information, let alone access it. But, with me being gifted with tech skills at an early age, I could do some damage.

Back to the wifi story. I noticed in my digging that my Novell account credentials would let me into their update share. I was able to mount the share as a network drive and look through it. I saw everything from MS Office VLKs, the Faronics uninstaller, network diagrams, etc. I did have some ethics back then, so I didn't touch anything related to a license key. But I did find the wifi deployment timetable document.

It turns out that the IT department had already deployed the wifi to my school and was fully functional...for them only. They had made it as a hidden network only accessible to them for "maintenance purposes". (Keep in mind that most of the school and administration was under the impression that it was going to be for student use.) The timetable document also listed the wifi password for the hidden network. With that information and the MAC/IP pattern I swiped from one of the school machines, I was able to log onto the "maintenance" wifi with my own personal laptop. This made me the talk of the student body ironically, with even one of the assistant principals asking me for help because the IT department had stopped communicating with the administration regarding the rollout.

Anyways, I used my newfound wifi powers to do my work and prep for college. Never used any of the serials or anything, just wanted to stop fighting over computer use. Ended up keeping the timetable document on a thumb drive until graduation before sticking it in my desk for a few more years. When I moved to Seattle for work, I ended up tossing the drive into the ship canal under the Fremont Bridge. (If someone finds it, I'll buy them a beer.)

Anyways, that's my unethical story.

TL;DR: Hacked into a network share to get wifi access in high school because the IT department embezzled funds.