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Comment by 0x0nyandesu | Hacker News Reader

I got expelled from high school because of this program.

I'm a millionaire now though so shrug

I was a hair's breadth away from expulsion too - exfiltrated .sam files from a PC in the library on a 3.5" floppy. Seems to be quite common experience judging by this thread.

Why did we all get caught? Smart enough to figure that out in your teens, dumb enough to think you can get away with it...

In my case I was operating with a dumbass friend who left a "calling card" on one of the compromised machines.

To be honest I fessed up for no reason. All they knew was I logged in to some box. I could have made some stuff up about doing some legitimate work and I'd probably have gotten away with it. At the time I was extremely naive and dumb. My advice to kids is not to stop doing things but to simply downplay what you were doing. "No I wasn't hacking. I was securing the system." Etc. Come up with plausible reasons and the benefit of doubt will generally keep things from escalating beyond the IT staff. Once admins start talking about hacking you've lost the war of words.

It's as much social engineering as anything else.

I didn't get caught.

But as a result of my demonstrative flexing cyber-security activity — I was granted with 'root' credentials on the school's SUSE Linux server… Which apparently at the same time was used as an ISP router for an entire city block.

This granted responsibility, unsurprisingly, turned out to be an extremely effective step to cool my eagerness to hack into all things.

They tried to expel me for this (among other) reason(s) too, though the Vice Principal went to bat for me and instead I was banned from using any computers on school property for the last couple years of high school instead.

Very similar experience - in the end no police, and I just had to stay back and write a long essay on why hacking is wrong (pretty sure I was an edgelord about it and wrote something nuanced about white-hatting...)

Congrats, how did you do it?

Combination of 401k growth, having a six figure income, cryptocurrency investments, and early investment in AMD and TSLA and a few side income streams.

Thanks for sharing.

Sounds like you owe your success more to WallStreetBets than hacking.

Eh I mined a lot of it and it's thanks to my computer skills that I was able to do so. Most of it was from that.

Also my stock positions predate wsb by like 7 years.

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