How I got in trouble at school for "hacking"

[immibis]

Our school uses a program called inGOT to measure, monitor and limit internet usage. It stores a copy of everyone's remaining balance (it measures usage in dollars for some reason) in an Access database on a shared folder. That copy isn't used for anything apart from displaying balances on everyone's computers. The small program used to display the balance is called "inGOT Balance".

I discovered that the folder the database was in had almost every permission for every user. That's including "change permissions", but strangely not "delete subfolder".

I wrote a program in VBA in Excel to send messages to other people who had the program running, by changing their full name (to whatever the message is) and balance (to $-12345 to signal that there's a message). It worked fine, until someone asked me to allow messages to be sent to multiple other users.

While adding that feature, I accidentally introduced a bug causing messages to be sent to every user, instead of just the ones you chose. Although I fixed it, someone had copied the broken version from the shared folder where I was working on it to their desktop. Although I told them to close it and reopen it to get the fix, I don't know if they did so, and I certainly didn't realise they'd copied it to their desktop. They then used it to spam several messages to someone.

inGOT Balance has a setting, which was turned on on the school network, to pop up when your balance is negative. So, when the program set everyone's balance to $-12345, it popped up on every single computer that was logged on.

Including the one that "Administrator" was logged on to.

Which was on the other side of the room from me.

(about this time, a teacher came into the room and asked the admin why her internet balance was $-12345 and why it said "From <user who sent the message>: <message>")

Although I quickly deleted the copy of the program I'd been working on, this person who had copied it to their desktop was able to show the admin anyway. Since he knew I was the only person in the room who would know how to do this, of course he guessed it was me.

And that's how I got in trouble today at school for hacking.

[Jat Goodwin]

That's not hacking.

[immibis]

Technically no, do you want me to put quote marks around it?
I'm sure everyone else in the school, including the admin, thought it was, though.

[Jat Goodwin]

Technically no, do you want me to put quote marks around it?
I'm sure everyone else in the school, including the admin, thought it was, though.

Lots of people think the world is going to end in 2012, that doesn't make it right. It's still not hacking.

[Jcd1230]

Haha, nice! Last year me and my friend got in trouble for using shutdown -i to remotely shut down peoples computers.. we didnt do it much cause we knew we would get in trouble but everyone else who did it (some of which we told :\ ) did it all the time and one day the teacher told me and my friend to tell her why peoples computers were shutting down... since we were like the only nerds who would actually know what it was.

[Jat Goodwin]

Haha, nice! Last year me and my friend got in trouble for using shutdown -i to remotely shut down peoples computers.. we didnt do it much cause we knew we would get in trouble but everyone else who did it (some of which we told :\ ) did it all the time and one day the teacher told me and my friend to tell her why peoples computers were shutting down... since we were like the only nerds who would actually know what it was.

That's not hacking either.

[Asphid]

cool story bro

[immibis]

That's not hacking either.

He never said it was.

[Drunkie]

Stop fucking with school computers. People go there to learn, asshole!

[Jat Goodwin]

Stop fucking with school computers. People go there to learn, asshole!

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