> The IT person easily figured out it was me and then tricked me into thinking I would be expelled within days.
Similar. I wrote a program to emulate a the logon text on a PDP-11 terminal in high-school in the mid-80s and steal a bunch of student passwords. Didn't do anything with them. They were like "trophies."
Nevertheless, the computer teacher found out and had mercy on me. He gave me a project to work on to help him compile stats on a student survey. He was a nice guy.
I did the same thing, only my program pretended to be a DOS-based Novell Netware login screen.
It was just a simple QBASIC program (that's all that was available on the Computer Room machines) running under my own login, which would write usernames and passwords to a text file in my user directory. I figured that I'd harvest a few passwords until someone got frustrated enough to call for the IT admin, at which point he would try to log in and reboot the PC when it failed, apparently "fixing" the problem and erasing any evidence of my dastardly crime.
I was right, and for a few glorious days I got away with it... until one particular arsehole picked on my best friend during recess, and I used his stolen credentials to log into his account and trash his files.
Long story short, I ended up getting expelled, which by a curious confluence of events put me on an unorthodox path that completely changed my life. Funny how things turn out.
> until someone got frustrated enough to call for the IT admin, at which point he would try to log in and reboot the PC when it failed, apparently "fixing" the problem and erasing any evidence of my dastardly crime.
This was precisely my logic as well.
> put me on an unorthodox path that completely changed my life.
Similar. I wrote a program to emulate a the logon text on a PDP-11 terminal in high-school in the mid-80s and steal a bunch of student passwords. Didn't do anything with them. They were like "trophies."
Nevertheless, the computer teacher found out and had mercy on me. He gave me a project to work on to help him compile stats on a student survey. He was a nice guy.
edit for clarity.