I think you should do a bit image backup of the hard drive using Clonezilla or similar and then reinstall what you want (dual book TinyWin10 & Arch for example). The you can fully restore the entire thing before you hand it back at the end. Otherwise isn't the hard disk removable on that laptop? It's probably tiny anyway, so change it for a bigger one and you can switch it back at the end.
Good old times. We did a similar thing 30 years ago. My professional school had a novel network running. They challenged us to hack it. Well, after 3 months programming class you can write a keylogger and collect all passwords including all admin accounts. Booth of us got an A.
IT admins can do better, but believe me when I say: most IT admins over 30 have already lost their souls to printer issues and they just don't care anymore. Only minimum effort to please the clueless management and if a feature wasn't explicitly requested then no feature and no one cares.
@@zloboslav_ Well first of all, all printers suck, let's be real. But for the most part, I've had good results with Toshiba. Other than the provided driver utility never working properly. But you solve that by deploying the printer and driver through a DC (either primary or secondary, we use a secondary DC for printer deployment) We use a Toshiba e-STUDIO2515AC as our main office printer. But we have a few brothers and HP's around the office. I'd say Toshiba, Brother, and HP in no particular order.
Reminds me of when our school changed IT admin, who then allowed flash game websites, When I asked him why, he said "if everyone can use the computers for schoolwork and fun, they are less likely to get trashed by bored students", and his previous school showed a 80% reduction in computer repair costs after allowing flash game websites Yes, students shouldn't be abusing the computers, but if you only can use something for boring stuff, you are less likely to take good care of it
I used to work in cybersecurity. Too many people thought that the only way to be "secure" was to lock everything down so hard that it barely worked at all. That is counterproductive. Firstly, you need too many admin overrides to make significant changes. Secondly, you make extra work for yourself by having to approve and enable edge cases that you forgot about. Thirdly, you did forget about something (as this video shows). And last but not least, you just frustrated people into using risky workarounds and trying to circumvent things. Also, "lock down ALL THE THINGS" means you've just been totally f-cking lazy and haven't thought about your users or their requirements at all. You need to have fine grain policies and just accept that sometimes "risky" or "insecure" things need to be done, and that they can be done securely if you think about it properly.
my high school got a new IT guy and i was using portable firefox + a vpn to play whatever online games i wanted he then used a remote control thing to fight me, and the battle resulted in the following things being blocked: - executables containing "firefox" - every yandex domain (i played yandex games when i lost firefox) - my internet access
@@MESYETIahh good times. I remember when the IT admins of our old school told our teachers that the current password of the staff WiFi is unhackable and then a week later the same kid started giving out the password to everyone good times
Reminder. Please don't shit talk the IT team here, they are almost certainly extremely under paid and overworked, so doing a "good enough for just some kids" to be able to meet quotas is more than likely all they really were able to.
Underpaid? Not likely, at least in the US where IT is typically paid a good salary. Overworked? Very possible especially in a public school setting even if there is a large IT team as they're typically managing an entire district.
i agree, IT at the school I go to gets paid than a teacher, $6k per year is bad, especially for the it who has to: 1. wipe the students device (so if its an intel MacBook it's so much harder because the school forces you to use MacBook's) 2. install spyware and shit and 3, check every pupils MacBook once per lesson.
this, the IT likely does not even care about you using bypasses, but they simply have to fix them because the school will fire you if they don't Bitlocker is standard on school computers to stop kids from using utilman BIOS really should be locked down on newer computers at least, noticing that is probably worth enough to email them.
I think this is in Belgium since the pc was in Dutch, and I got the same laptop in my school, and Belgium isnt as generous with loans as the US. and This is probably just from the state, which is even worse. My IT-teacher helped there for awhile and always complained@@antikommunistischaktion
Given the laptop's language settings and keyboard layout, I know he's from a western European country where tech illiteracy and incompetence is severely commonplace... The fact that he (the student) knows the existence of Linux, makes him more competent that 95% of the IT admins in set country... Not to mention the problem of tech illiterate ( IT ) management, that want's things their way without knowing or caring about any of the consequences...
Education IT admin here. Here's the thing: Windows and all Microsoft products have been, and always will be, built for business. They can put a skin on something, add one or two functions and call it an "educational" product (I'm looking at you Teams), but at the end of the day, it is still built with semi-trusted adults in mind. The problem with students is that you can expect them to exploit the tiniest of cracks (I know as I was one of them), of which there are many, most of which we know about, and some we don't. We are perpetually moulding a fork into a spoon, and it will never be perfect because it was never designed for this purpose. People saying we are understaffed and underpaid, you are 100% correct; the computer I use is amalgamated scavenged parts from PCs you broke, and no, the IT budget is not my budget. Look, at the end of the day, every staff member, including me, has the responsibility to safeguard you. My job is to keep you digitally safe while in school. The computers are the way they are because they need to be capable of supporting teaching and learning, and when it's a free-for-all, it cannot be done. They are slow because there's only so much money for anything. We are doing the best we can with what we have, and we only want to make sure you can learn in a safe environment. And your thank you means a lot.
We had Chromebooks, which were even more network restricted, but it still managed to find a site that let me bypass that, playing games and watching unblocked RUclips
@@sd1gaming I attempted to crack my chromebook and bricked it. This was after I graduated. It is apparently really straightforward to change a chromebook to linux
At the end of the day, it really isn't the school's business what a student does on their laptops while not in school, or even in school for that matter. You can't really be unsafe on the internet... By definition of actual danger. You can expose yourself to thinks that can create a risk for yourself, but by nature of the internet... You can not be put physically in danger simply by using it. Students should not have access to credit cards or otherwise... So the financial risks "should" be mitigated. The argument that measures like these keep students "safe" is pure posturing. There is no purpose to most of these measures. On the other hand, with computers that are on the same network, there's a greater risk to the network itself and to the data of connected devices, and servers. There is still a lot you can do to protect that network data and other computers without infringing on the rights of the students. Network scanners, and dpi are a few things. At the end of the day the measures most companies do to protect their networks, can't be replicated in a school setting. Rather, in a school setting it is more beneficial for students to be able to screw up their devices and be forced to fix them themselves then it is to try to prevent that... Nevermind the fact that students shouldn't be using laptops in general, explicitly because it adds nothing to the educational experience. Rather it only detracts from it. Students need to be taught in class and one on one. They don't need the distraction of a pc to do their work. They need printouts, they need teachers that are involved and invested in the education of their students. And on a technological level, they don't need the school filtering what they access. Students need and deserve to seek outside information from sources that the school might not agree with. If a school let's say blocks fox news, but doesn't block msnbc or blocks pro-climate change sites but doesn't block site arguing against climate change, you have a problem. You no longer have education you have indoctrination.
In my school in Finland everyone got laptops for free and they had absolutely no restrictions on them. Full admin rights and no bios password. I think they even told us we can install Linux on them if we prefer. After graduating, they offered us to buy the laptop for 30€ which obviously (almost) everyone did. Still have mine as a backup linux laptop.
Nice, it was good that you got free laptops for your studies, but even better when you can just buy it completely for such a small amount! I'd have definitely bought it at €30 :D
To be honest you're the first person that managed to go past my "Dutch Detection System" in me, usually i can notice the Dutch accent cause i lived in the Netherlands for like 6 to 8 years but you're English Accent is quite good the only thing that gave it away was Windows🤣🤣
I'm not even surprised with these 'IT experts' from organizations. My friend had police involved with her kid and the police wanted to investigate kid's laptop. Unfortunately, owner was dead. Police took the laptop away for months and when they gave it back, they told her they are still trying to crack the password and how was she planning to crack it. She gave me the laptop and I cracked it in 10~15 minutes. You don't even need to know the password or anything. So yeah. IT experts.
10 years ago or so when I was still in school we used MacBooks running 10.5 Leopard. The security of these things was hilariously bad. This was right when smartphones were starting to gain popularity and the school did not have free WiFi. You could simply start the machine in single-user-mode (which is basically an emergency safe mode that brings you to a command line with full admin rights) and run a simple command that made the OS forget that the first time setup had already been ran. When you then rebooted the machine, it would boot up as if you first started the OS with that fancy intro animation MacOS had back then and allowed you to set up a new admin account. From there on I was able to retrieve the WiFi password and shared it with some friends. They obviously noticed the unwanted guests and changed the password, but within 10 minutes I’d always get the new password again. This went on for a few months and then they introduced free WiFi. As time went on, they never updated those machines so eventually they started becoming hard to use. You were stuck with a very old version of Safari that had very poor HTML5 support and couldn’t render websites properly. The version of Flash player that was installed (yeah that was still a thing) was also too old so pretty much anything interactive stopped working. We told the IT department about this multiple times but they couldn’t care less…. So I continued using this trick so we could install a modern web browser and update Flash player so we could actually use the laptops for their intended purpose. It was pretty known that I knew how to “crack” these machines, but no one snitched as I was the one giving them the power to play Minecraft on it and watch RUclips. At some point I was just cracking MacBook after MacBook because IT refused to update the software. This went on for years and IT could not care less, to the point where even teachers started asking me to crack their MacBook without snitching me to IT… Or possibly IT knew already and didn’t care. I mean I was essentially doing their job for them… With the downside that students were now playing games during class.
Story time. My school used crappy little laptops (Dell Latitude 3340), and basically locked down everything on it. Well, myself and a group of friends had recently discovered Warmane, or for those who aren't familiar with it, a World of Warcraft 3.3.5a (Wrath of the Lich King) private server. We wanted to all play it, but not everyone had a personal laptop they could bring from home. We did however, have the school laptops which surprisingly, could run it. Using a mix of Kali Linux and making our own VPN service (we were high schoolers, we weren't gonna pay for a VPN), we made a second partition on the hdd, and installed a second copy of Win 10 on each of our laptops and were able to run WoW (and any other game we wanted that would run on the hardware) on it. The IT admins, by locking the laptops down, ended up teaching us more about computers, internet protocols and "hacking" than our entire computer science courses did.
why would the people paid to lie to you want you to be able to break the system? of course the computer science classes taught you nothing, that's all they're meant to do: lie to you
@@davidturcotte831 If I remember correctly we used chntpw to unlock the built in admin account, and used that account to mess with the built in admin account. At first, I believe we just ran our stuff either off of that admin account or a second user we made, but eventually we just made that second partition so it was easier to clean up when we had to turn our laptops in at the end of the year. Kali wasn't necessarily required for what we were doing, but it was a convenient collection of different software and just how we did it.
@@davidturcotte831 probably live boot for the partition manager. In which case the thing wasn't as locked down as he says it was. And then using the vpn to circumvent the schools locked down internet access.
a couple classmates at my high school were able to just do chrome://kill then chrome://hang on an extension code page and get unrestricted internet access
As an actual School IT Support staff myself I want to say a few things, I feel I need to. The OS is a part I want to address, especially if students are using them for 4 years straight when we get the laptops back we do not even turn them on apart from to check the display, we will re-image them using the school image as its basic practice to do so unless it is a chromebook. Also and this is only me personally, if i got a laptop from a student back with a custom OS i would not say anything because some of the limitations are god awful. The BIOS, if you lock it with your own password we will never get it back and would have to throw the laptop away which is a shame but the truth, modern devices do not allow for a bios reset easily and sometimes its not even worth it. Also that was an oversight not to lock it. Also the hidden security thing is terrible, and is a massive security flaw in the system as usually we should use a login based system or a single user distro as locking to mac addresses is very time consuming and annoying to do.
As a former cybersecurity analyst, my recommendation would be to have the WiFi connecting into/authenticating through RADIUS or some kind of VPN setup and simply removing the password entirely. Any machines connecting to the AP will have to supply a certificate or suchlike. If you don't have that, you're not authenticated. That's far more secure than a password anyone can sniff, extract, or simply guess.
@@halfbakedproductions7887 oh absolutely yeah, for whatever reason where I work does not do that however from what I know we are planning to integrate that into the future network
At the middle school I went to the network was set up in a way that packets from any PC were essentially routed to all parts of the network. This meant that if one were to run a packet sniffer, one would get the passwords from essentially everyone connected including teachers (this was almost 20 years ago and encryption wasn't as widely used back then). We even managed to get the credentials for the system used by the teachers to input student grades at the end of the school year. Half of the computers on the network also had their entire hard drives shared without a password. Suffice to say, we didn't misuse this knowledge beyond pulling a couple harmless pranks, like for example writing a script that would change the background wallpaper on half of the schools computers to an image we uploaded.
My friend found out that that on websites that are blocked with a popup page from the school you could right click then "inspect" to see the page code, and he could see the whole list of search terms and banned words that would ping the school system if you were to search them up. It was funny. The school system itself was so bad he was able to ping the server for fun just by opening a new tab, copy-paste, then enter-ing to search the term - leading to DDOSing the school by hand just from a crappy chromebook. The whole system shut down and for the whole day blocked websites were temporarily accessible.
For anyone getting into linux, I would not recommend manjaro as a first option since its known to have a bad history with how they manage their packages and I would recommend a distro like the debian based MX Linux or just standard arch (which is actually pretty easy to install now thanks to their guided installer) instead
@@asdfghjklqzwxI know that, but why are you telling me this 😭 I started on endeavouros but I really don't recommend Arch or any Arch-based distro to ANY beginner.
Nice! Did this with my NSW laptop back in 2013 along with my mates. Bit different though, we had a locked bios so I had to force shutting the computer until it let me do a PC check, and at the end it would generate a txt file I could open in notepad. Used notepad's 'open file' dialog to make the on screen keyboard exe command prompt, then set the local account to admin like you did. Crazy thing too is that we were the last year to get laptops so no teachers knew how to check if we'd cracked them so we all installed fresh versions of windows and got steam on there
I remember when we had to do the exams (midterms) in the Safe Exam Browser. From the moment I heard we have to use it I started to think how to circumvent it. No one will lock down my own PCs! I circumvented it by running the safe exam browser in a virtual machine and changing some VM configs so SEB doesn’t know it is a VM. Disclaimer - I did this for research purposes, not cheating. Maybe if I got the school PC (I used my own PC during covid), circumventing the security would be the first thing to do - I just can’t help myself
@@nick-me1ni sadly it was patched in later versions. Current version requires exactly 1 display - no more, no less. If you have 2 monitors for example, it should't start. When you are running it in virtual machine, you actually have 0 monitors - it won't start. I am still trying to figure it out. I am thinking about putting another GPU into the system and dedicate it to the VM and plugging a dummy HDMI display in it
@@branimirfilovski8388i’ve set up my own custom VM for exams, it’s VirtualBox Windows 10 with Virtualization disabled, invisible highlight (for copying and pasting) and cross clipboard between vm and host it’s good for proctored exams, maybe not lockdown browser
Dude I used the uni PCs to bruteforce the NTLM hash of the same PC, write cracked pass down on paper and hand it to the admins with evil smile. When they finally (3rd or 4th attempt) made a large enough password to make EGB useless I just bruteforced the LM hash (yes they didn't disable) and purely guessed the rest of it. Fun times.
If you have the bitlocker key, you can boot from Linux live USB and use it to remove/reset the administrator password or elevate your user account to local administrator. Then do whatever you want on the laptop. Personally. I would pull the drive and replace it with your own drive and format it to your liking. When its time to hand in the computer at the end of the year, replace their drive and hand it in.
i did this once, they were smart enough to have a bios password but they didn't really have much else, so i just plugged in a windows usb, went into cmd, and messed around with windows files until i could change the administrator password edit: didnt watch the video when i wrote this comment, funny that you did the exact same thing
I remember getting around installing Steam in a .zip file to bypass the administration password and being able to play Portal 2 on the school laptops that were given to me. It worked and ran at 15 fps 🤣
We got an upgraded computer lab with Pentium 4 cpus and discrete GPUs + LCD monitors when I was in 7th grade. I had two classes in there and being me, I was able to install snex9x, project64 and the Halo demo with no restrictions. We had some 24 player matches going on at times. I remember sniping my teacher out of a banshee one blood gulch and him flipping me off. It got out of hand where people were going to play during lunch and after school and the vice principal noticed. They weren't down with the violence and it had to end lmao. Fun times.
Ah, the laptop is intune managed. If the IT staff cared you would know by now, doing stuff like removing bitlocker or adding new local administrator accounts should be throwing alerts if they have it set up correctly. I dont work in a school environment though. I dont know if you can do this without domain admin permissions but with local admin rights you might be able to add your domain account to the local administrator group.
For the BIOS password: it just makes it a little bit harder, but still not completely impossible to bypass. For someone brave and determined enough they can always unplug the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS, or just pop out the hard drive, replace the OS with another computer, pop it back in.
Nope, not on Lenovo, HP and Dell's The bios password is stored in a different place, resetting / removing battery won't help. On HP's it even could lock the bios permanently, until the masterkey ( on external usb ) is inserted.
Not with all laptops not with all. For example the Lenovo Thinkpad x201i, if you remove the CMOS battery the machine is literally hard locked with a unknown password You cannot boot and you cannot go to BIOS. To get around it you literally have to short the BIOS chip WHILE BOOTING and then go into BIOS and short again so you can remove the lock in the BIOS... I had to go through this and FUCK LENOVO FOR EVEN THINKING OF THIS... I spent hours trying to fix it and I finally did it and the relief I got after the amount of pain I went through.
the thing is even with this level of security it still works 99% of the time, the fact is that the general student is ignorant enough of these things, only people with either good pc skills, geeks, word of mouth, or even sheer willpower can and not everyone is like that
I did the same for my school iPad, which had Apple's mobile device management (MDM) enabled. After 3 hours of messing around I had figured out, that I could just remove it by modifying the HTTP traffic between the MDM server and the device using a proxy. Fun stuff!
This makes me think back to when the IT staff put a message in bold yellow that these computers are not for playing games and my friends hacked in and changed it to say different...
I remember using a VPN to bypass network filters at my school. Of course, you couldn't download anything because of that, so instead I just used a flash drive that had the setup and installed it from there (for some reason my school allowed you to install stuff, but they probably didn't think much of it, because it's not like you could download anything anyway). Never got caught.
I was on my schools IT’s good side so much the asked me to come back next year to work for them lol, safe to say I got anything I wanted installed when I needed it so it was basically my laptop anyways. Also, dear god man the damage you have probably caused to countless school networks, I both praise you for taking initiative to grant yourself more freedom but also curse you for the work ima be doing next year.
Used to bring a persistent live Linux flash drive to school in high school to fuck around without the teacher being able to see my screen with their surveillance software Don't remember the distro, I think it was probably Kubuntu 14.04-16.04. Unfortunately, this was pre-Proton, so there weren't that many games I could easily play but I remember playing a lot of Minecraft, SPORE and SuperTuxKart since they were trivial to run. Skyrim and other more modern games for the time were possible but required a lot of tweaking in WINE
i had a chromebook several years ago, and when i was still required to use it, i unintentionally figured out that the browser monitoring software i was using wouldnt function properly and just reported i was "offline" if i left my PC at home turned on with some tabs open on the same account. This never became a problem again when i started using my own laptop and ran everything on firefox instead of chrome
My school has a bunch of security measures when it comes to the OS but they didn't use a bitlocker for our School laptop so I can just reset windows or install Linux whenever I wanted! Back in 8th grade I used to reset people's laptops for a couple bucks But I ended up stopping because someone tried to snitch on me!
If I was did the same thing I would delete their school account (and maybe some other accounts like Google or Microsoft if there password is bad enough). That'll show them who's boss
i work for a company that provisions laptops for schools and such, we can see everything you do on them unless you've fresh installed windows without the profile and even then we can see that your device has gone off line and would be enquiring as to why. Last week i had to call an engineer to tell him we knew he was constantly looking at adult sites and issue him with a final warning before we disable his laptop! WHICH he 100% needs for work and would have to explain why its dead.
Last year the engineering classroom at my school got new computers. Guess what? Same thing, they forgot to set a bios password. I ran off of a portable copy of ubuntu the whole year lol
My schools IT department is pretty stupid too, they gave everyone a Testing account and for some reason it had administrator privileges (you had to do a couple things to get it working because of how they set it up), it also might have been a domain admin too.
This takes me back. In my high school they supplied us with laptops that didn't have admin access, locked customization, "blocked" sites (they just remapped the domains to localhost), and a whole bunch of other stuff that made it just impossible to use the laptop in any personal capacity. So in the first 24 hours of the laptops being handed out each year, everyone would go to a dedicated file that was available for a few weeks (on the school NAS) made by myself & some friend filled with scripts & tools to remove whatever restrictions they implemented to block us between now & the year prior. It actually reached the point the IT department started giving me a laptop without restrictions in hopes it was stop me from finding/making & sharing tools to others. Needless to say, it didn't stop me & in my final year I decided to leave the file up and let the years below me know the name of in hopes they would still be valid for years to come
As someone who was an IT assistant at a school over the summer, I give a thumbs up, nice work! 👍 if your curious yeah especially at schools usually security is bad we just have the bare minimum in without being too easy lol
Had a similar situation, except the bios on the computers at my school were password protected. Didn't really care though, just ripped the SSD out of one of the more high spec CAD computers (very gently) and plugged in my portable drive with Windows installed and it automatically booted to it. It wasn't all that slow and even if Steam was blocked and throttled on the network I could sometimes squeak out enough bandwidth for a game or just install it at home and bring it with.
also with how many of us got our start circumventing parental restrictions there's a non zero percent chance this oversight was left in to let some student experience that rite of passage for themselves
So when i was in high school i worked for the IT team senior year. The one thing that comes to mind about bad IT management is one of the Sr, Admins had lost a usb with all kinds of IT stuff but the biggest Facepalm was all the system passwords where on it, From Bios passwords to Root server passwords.
that's a lucky oversight my middle school's admins were so strict that even though i got to keep the "laptop" and did the unlocking procedure correctly, it's still locked to this day (i'm in university already) and the only way possible to access it besides changing the bios password (which i cannot do) is by changing the hardware itself maybe there's an exploit but i didn't get back to it in a very long time
In my Senior year, some update to the software made us unable to use USB DRIVES. They never told us that it was going to happen, and it made transferring actual school files a lot more annoying, but i understand why they did it...
Many many years ago (early 90s I think) the high school I was at had a computer lab with macs of some kind (not sure which model, it was one of the beige ones though) that ran software called At Ease (designed to lock the systems down and limit what you could run). But it was possible to use a feature in one of the Microsoft Office apps to browse to the location of the At Ease program file and delete it and defeat the production. Definitely not the fault of anyone on the IT team, just strange that the developers of the software didn't stop the software's main program file from being deleted...
You've rolled so many great tricks into one convenient, entertaining video. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge, device freedom should be something everyone wants.
I got past the school laptop blocks on mine back in the day we got given windows vista / 7 machines everything was locked to shit on it i realized you could get into system recovery if u purposely caused it to have an issue (only way to, couldnt get there through any shortcuts) so if you pulled out the battery mid boot it would go there next time around After it did its thing you could see the results which would open up a notepad document pre-boot. you could navigate to system32, replace the stickykeys executable with a copy of cmd log in then log out, can then alter your account through cmd to be admin, use that to then get rid of all the block crap installed on it I got caught and got in so much crap for it lmfao cause i helped others out who blabbed. These laptops keep in mind the government here in australia claimed, for some absurd reason were unhackable.
I did something similar with my school laptop, I used both a portable Windows install and an arch Linux install on an external drive. I always say, if you have physical unrestrained access to a PC you will crack it, nothing you can do
Our school is using one ftp server where all windows user profiles are stored. I just periodically filled that thing up with a neat powershell script and stopped every person in the school from being able to open or save any files
For us we were given a laptop that we were supposed to install wkndows on. If you were to download windows the normal way, ir would download windows 11 as a student OS pre installing all security measures psswords and programs that youd use through out the year. Fortunately for me, there was a simple button in the installer called "don't install windows as a student" which allowed mye full access to the computer, of course without the required programs reinstalled but those were free or I could download it with my school license externally later anyway. Didn' need any knowledge on how to do anything, managed to avoid windows 11 and all security measures with the click of a single button. When I have to return it, I'm planning to wipe the drive and leave it on the installation menu for windows just like how I was given it. Edit: If I remember correctly I watched a friend of mine who didn't do what I did type "Make me an admin" in the search bar and it literally gave him full access to the computer as well.
My middle school's computers are really easy to get around. They DID have a lock on the bios, but you could still change the boot order soo... not sure what the point of the BIOS lock was. The laptops aren't that locked down, but it took me a while to mess with them because they had to stay at school meaning I couldn't take them home (Whenever it loaded into bios it made a LOUD beeping noise so I got a lot of dirty looks). They don't actually block all that much tho, so after messing around with some live-usbs (Ubuntu because it had Safe Boot on), I just installed a portable version of Steam, Minecraft, Undertale etc. really easy actually. They for some reason left ONE version of powershell open a random one aswell (Powershell ISE (x86)) for some reason.
Actually, Lenovo machines do allow admins to set the BIOS password remotely - but ONLY if there was already a password manually set. Which in your case there wasn't, so never mind. My guess is the password needs to be set because you'd need the old password as authentication for creating the new one. I'm not sure what the situation is with other laptop brands, although I'd imagine enterprise-grade vendors like Dell would be able to do that as well. The WiFi could also be better secured via certificates or simply have it pointing into a VPN meaning you could go no further unless you were authenticated.
One weekend my college decided to set up NAC (network access control) on their wired network. I came in the next day and it took me 10-20 min to bypass it. They literally just whitelisted certain MAC addresses belonging to the college computers, so I just cloned one of those devices and connected. All restrictions on what sites you can access are done through DNS and only locally on the college computers, so I literally just have unrestricted access to the internet, even tor works. Ill disclose it to them once they finally fix the student wifi.
I think one of our shenanigans during vocational school was turning the firewall against the school's monitoring software to do what ever we wanted on the machines
Genshin Impact works fine on Linux I've been playing it for weeks using Bottles, which automates setting up a wine environment with gaming patches applied. I use Gentoo with GNOME, though this probably doesn't matter. It was honestly a breeze to set up, the only problem I had was some crazy visual glitches at first but I just had to toggle "Post-Processing Effects" in the Bottle setting and it worked fine since.
I’m from the US and on our school laptops it will let you completely reset the laptop for some reason( idk why? ) through windows troubleshoot. If you do so it will reset the computer and attempt to add you to the schools services, when it can’t it gives up and dies. All you have to do to get past this is literally just open terminal, type explorer to open Edge or internet explorer and download windows 10 22H2 update tool and when it updates it will always make an account if there isn’t one present and log you in as admin, just go through normal setup and remove azure accounts, and your done!
I remember getting admin access through the repair process when you power on and off the windows 7 laptop really quickly. Just rename sethc to cmd and you're good. Ahh. Good times. Got caught though.
Ahhh a Intune enrolled device. To answer the following question: why are they giving us the bitlocker key: well they enabled that feature on purpose. When there is a problem with the security chip also known as tpm you still have access to the bitlocker Recover key. Bitlocker wasn't enabled to keep the end user (you) from doing anything but to keep your data save when someone stole your laptop. You can only access the keys from the laptops where you are the primary user on. Also disabling bitlocker will make you device not compliant if they have enabled that check in intune. Also! Id you have set some policies regarding conditional access you even could loss access to the school network, your files, and the ability to sign in. Butt that depends on the school system admins. Have fun with your device! - It admin (not from your school)
I've been out of schooling for a long time now but I remember "borrowing" school laptops like you would library books, so it's absurd to me that schools out there are charging students to rent laptops from them now. Letting students outright buy a laptop through them would still be iffy but at least that'd be a little more understandable. Bizarre.
My school uses iPads with a keyboard (I swear im in highschool) and all I did was swap out my iPad with a iPad that looked exactly like the school one and had the same apps wallpaper etc... but I had full permissions on this one. I also did the same wifi trick on one of the school dell computers in the computer lab.
they say they professionals when I able to fix some of their problems without even asking them " you can`t learn if you don`t try yourself don`t tell IT before trying if you can fix it"
What if all the security measurements are actually like this on purpose? Giving loopholes for students to try and gain access over their machines. Learning about security in the process. Yes, exactly like that one exam episode in Naruto.
You give these schools too much credit 😂 The Teachers and/or staff aren't that smart (If they were they wouldn't be dealing with snot-nose brats for essentially indentured servitude pay ((College Professors on the other hand make good money mainly it's mostly public school teachers getting shafted))
I used that "make admin account from installer" bypass once when an update somehow locked me out of my account. Ironically, that was also what prompted me to install linux on the thing.
I had a not pleasant time in high school and my senior year was the first year we had Chromebooks so there was no policy on how we had to return them other than they couldn't be damaged. Luckily for me, being completely disassembled and being damaged are two different things apparently.
I have a school laptop as well but my IT department is a little better at stopping this shenanigans, so I took it as my personal mission to hack that little Microsoft Surface go. I found that if you use a Linux bootable usb (with Gnome preferably) you have a disk utility, with that you can just click format disk with or without bitlocker and reinstall windows! I immediately started selling that exploit at school and I (no joke) made hundreds of dollars, people wanted to get admin rights and blast away school bloatware. I made bank🎉
I was working as an IT in my elementary school as a part of my IT high school. IT people in my work place dont even know the wifi passwords / Network domain login info, so we had to climb up a ladder to reset a router. Dont worry, they aint as good in technology.
I spent more time in school jailbreaking than actually paying attention in computer classes. The head of Science were none too pleased when he found out students had full read write access to the Science Shared drive. It was hidden but you could access it if you knew the address, a fantastic way to avoid the spyware watching your disk, and bonus storage! As our disks were 10GB each.
I remember doing this back in highschool. Back then we used something called "crosh" and "crouton," and you could install stuff like XFCE, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint. Was really great for playing Minecraft during class.😂
LMAO, thats not how it is at all. I take offense as an IT Admin. Read my comment above, but basically the policies put in place are not there with power users in mind and that is not what we are trying to prevent.
@@djust270 The IT 'professionals' blocked command prompt and PowerShell but forgot to disable the group policy editor. I re-enabled command prompt and PowerShell really easily because they messed up. Also, they can't program (whereas I can program in JavaScript and I'm learning Python).
pretty interesting some time ago I found an old laptop from a family member who didn't return it and had a hard time getting rid of the encryption stuff, and the linked microsoft account and school domain couldn't be removed no matter what I tried best I could do is replace the drive, wipe it(along with the entire bitlocker) on another pc, then reinstall windows, the bios wasn't actually locked either :)
I remember the time I circumvented the limitations on my school laptop. I managed to get cmd running using a batch script, then I managed to get steam working by installing it to a different location that wasn't the default one (since the default one was blocked), then I somehow managed to give myself admin... I don't remember how, but it was fun.
I have a School Windows Tablet with Windows 11 and we don't have admin restrictions, bitlocker or bios locks. I had games like csgo, valorant and even league of legends on the PC.
As a school IT admin, do whatever you want. We lock it down for compliance purposes and if you come crying about things not working, we're just going to re-image it. The majority of kids that come to me are 'I'm using linux and i can't do '. Thats why standard operating environments exist. I'm not going to waste time troubleshooting, I'll just reimage. You're not 'smart', we just have better things to do, like protecting core services from actual threats, not hunting kids that want to play games on steam. EDIT: I will note when I was in HS I cracked the local admin pw on my sisters school laptop with ophcrack. it was 'marvin' turns out that was the same pw they used for their servers and everything else.. so i get the allure.
Word of Caution: DO NOT TAMPER WITH COMPUTERS YOU DO NOT OWN. There may be serious consequences and you should not even consider doing something like this on any work computer. The consequences in that case are vastly worse. From termination of employment to civil / criminal / legal consequences. If you think IT won't notice the system has been tampered with; think again. The latest security tools are remarkable. IT Security may be notified within mere minutes of a change. Perhaps not an educational institution but certainly in the private sector where IT security is taken far more seriously.
I do see the concern, but this is a school computer, with obviously bad security to the point that this sort of thing would likely not be noticed If this was a shared device, I would advise NOT being the most recent user to login to it, to have logged into that OS installation at all, then it might be fine to "ethically" screw with But also be careful on personally loaned out devices Also, people doing this sort of stuff are much less likely to install malware or anything than the average work computer user
@Sqaaakoi that doesn't make sense. "Sorry officer, I broke in to his house because he had cheap locks". Also they might have bad security now, but they might install crowdstrike on there tomorrow, and everyone who is doing this stuff is going to be collectively nailed.
@@cansofcoke Yeah, I used to work in cybersecurity and I just wanted to slap anyone who said "They deserved to be hacked because their security was so awful". What a monumentally crap line of reasoning that is. Let's see how you like it when I find an open window at your place, climb in and steal your PS5 and also your car because you left the keys in an obvious place? Oh wait you wouldn't like it and you would inform the police, fully expecting them to help you and recover your stuff. But you "deserved" to be the victim of a crime because you failed to secure your home because you simply forgot? Of course you don't deserve that. Nobody does. So why does the owner of a hacked IT system "deserve it"?
In my school, we have this restriction software (NetSupport School) that the teacher uses to monitor us in the IT class. So how did I get around it? Open Task Manager, right click the process, "End process tree". Like, at this point just go to each student individually to check assignments.
Even if that didn't exist you could just open the laptop up, remove the SSD put it into another computer, wipe the OS and the boot loader from the disk and re-install the OS. Schools don't realize you cannot control a machine you don't physically have. No matter how much restriction you put as long as it is digital it is shitty.
So i was in the same situation, but the BIOS is locked and i don't need to hand it in. So yeah i first managed to create a local admin account at first login by not having any wifi network in the area, it's just that i wanted to not have to connect to a Microsoft account since i already installed Windows before and that part is a pain. So that was deceptively easy, i kept it like that a few months, but i eventually started getting tired of the org. limitations and Windows itself since using WSL was easier for the amateur dev i was doing. So with the conditions in mind, i just took out the M.2 drive and put it in my tower, installed Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 then transitioned to Kubuntu) and put it back in. I also did the same thing to a friend's computer, i tried to setup dual boot with GRUB but secure boot blocked it from loading Windows strangely. So yeah now i, and my friend, can do everything we want, i am typing this on it, the next step is to Libreboot it. P.S. : There was also Bitlocker but ig since i had an admin account and then i wiped the drive i never encountered it.
Man, when I had a school laptop, it was the most locked down thing ever. BIOS had password, apps that needed administrator were blocked, and they even forced a custom wallpaper. Now if this stuff is happening, imagine the things I could do..
Back in high school 14 years ago we didnt have laptops at all. Only me and two of my mates had them, we weren't supposed to but we did anyway, and we used them exclusively to mess around with linux. I got on to the school's wifi by lifting the network certificate from my english teachers laptop.
i remember i think a year or two ago i just used at windows install usb to swap out utilman exe for cmd in sys32 and used the admin cmd from the accessability button on lock screen to make a new admin account and used that on the same ol windows install
As someone who was #1 on the IT teams Most Wanted list I can tell you that they don't really care that much about making stuff like this uncrackable, anyone who can do stuff like this isn't likely to do anything seriously bad and the IT team is likely too busy with stuff they aren't' paid enough to do.
When I started 7th grade, everyone got to borrow brand spanking new macbook pros (mid 2012 model) for free all through to the end of 9th grade. Nothing was locked down. Not even the school wifi. A few years later they started blocking some websites, like those hosting adult "hugging" videos.
fun fact you can sometimes straight up retreive the bitlocker password from command prompt / powershell in the recovery menu (if you can already change the boot order as such, but you can also manage it if you can create a boot loop that causes bitlocker to go into the bitlocker recovery/restore menu locked myself out of one of my own bitlocked machines once and was deeply displeased to find out about that
Man the cmd takes me back. I remember doing that to a middle school desktop but I didn't even need an installer because of how Windows 7 startup repair wasn't fully automatic. I stopped after that though because I knew to not do regrettable stuff on school pcs. Another kid didn't and they got suspended after getting all the account pswds :/. Also I wish I knew about the wifi thing. I def would've tried to get the staff only wifi password.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
If you enjoyed this video please feel free to subscribe and check out some of my other Deview episodes!
(The ePocalypse is a personal favourite!)
I think you should do a bit image backup of the hard drive using Clonezilla or similar and then reinstall what you want (dual book TinyWin10 & Arch for example). The you can fully restore the entire thing before you hand it back at the end. Otherwise isn't the hard disk removable on that laptop? It's probably tiny anyway, so change it for a bigger one and you can switch it back at the end.
Good old times. We did a similar thing 30 years ago. My professional school had a novel network running. They challenged us to hack it. Well, after 3 months programming class you can write a keylogger and collect all passwords including all admin accounts. Booth of us got an A.
Thing is I did all this in the first day of me getting mine, told it about IT AND THEY DIDNT FIX IT XDDDDD
school laptops zijn opzettelijk slecht beveiligd om op die mannier nieuwe ITers en hackers te creëeren
congratulations you played yourself
Can you shoutout my channle.
IT admins can do better, but believe me when I say: most IT admins over 30 have already lost their souls to printer issues and they just don't care anymore.
Only minimum effort to please the clueless management and if a feature wasn't explicitly requested then no feature and no one cares.
Exactly. I work in IT and this is the case 90% of the time.
@@justrightlizard yo wassup, what's the best printer manufacturer in your opinion? XD
@@zloboslav_ Well first of all, all printers suck, let's be real. But for the most part, I've had good results with Toshiba. Other than the provided driver utility never working properly. But you solve that by deploying the printer and driver through a DC (either primary or secondary, we use a secondary DC for printer deployment)
We use a Toshiba e-STUDIO2515AC as our main office printer. But we have a few brothers and HP's around the office.
I'd say Toshiba, Brother, and HP in no particular order.
@@justrightlizard it was a bait question lmao XD and the answer is all printers suck, I wasn't serious about it :)
@@zloboslav_ LOLOL
Reminds me of when our school changed IT admin, who then allowed flash game websites, When I asked him why, he said "if everyone can use the computers for schoolwork and fun, they are less likely to get trashed by bored students", and his previous school showed a 80% reduction in computer repair costs after allowing flash game websites
Yes, students shouldn't be abusing the computers, but if you only can use something for boring stuff, you are less likely to take good care of it
I used to work in cybersecurity. Too many people thought that the only way to be "secure" was to lock everything down so hard that it barely worked at all.
That is counterproductive. Firstly, you need too many admin overrides to make significant changes. Secondly, you make extra work for yourself by having to approve and enable edge cases that you forgot about. Thirdly, you did forget about something (as this video shows). And last but not least, you just frustrated people into using risky workarounds and trying to circumvent things.
Also, "lock down ALL THE THINGS" means you've just been totally f-cking lazy and haven't thought about your users or their requirements at all. You need to have fine grain policies and just accept that sometimes "risky" or "insecure" things need to be done, and that they can be done securely if you think about it properly.
schools shouldn't be abusing the kids soo
my high school got a new IT guy and i was using portable firefox + a vpn to play whatever online games i wanted
he then used a remote control thing to fight me, and the battle resulted in the following things being blocked:
- executables containing "firefox"
- every yandex domain (i played yandex games when i lost firefox)
- my internet access
@@MESYETIahh good times. I remember when the IT admins of our old school told our teachers that the current password of the staff WiFi is unhackable and then a week later the same kid started giving out the password to everyone good times
@@MESYETIrespect for fighting back and not just obeying authority.
Students gonna come right to this video for generations to come
The Sandal Channel: The one stop shop for gaming on school laptops
@@user-xv9mq Yes you can! You can set a BIOS/UEFI password
@@user-xv9mq you can, and i have done it before
The Tech are already here
Lol, just wait until they lock the BIOS
Reminder. Please don't shit talk the IT team here, they are almost certainly extremely under paid and overworked, so doing a "good enough for just some kids" to be able to meet quotas is more than likely all they really were able to.
Underpaid? Not likely, at least in the US where IT is typically paid a good salary. Overworked? Very possible especially in a public school setting even if there is a large IT team as they're typically managing an entire district.
i agree, IT at the school I go to gets paid than a teacher, $6k per year is bad, especially for the it who has to: 1. wipe the students device (so if its an intel MacBook it's so much harder because the school forces you to use MacBook's) 2. install spyware and shit and 3, check every pupils MacBook once per lesson.
this, the IT likely does not even care about you using bypasses, but they simply have to fix them because the school will fire you if they don't
Bitlocker is standard on school computers to stop kids from using utilman
BIOS really should be locked down on newer computers at least, noticing that is probably worth enough to email them.
I think this is in Belgium since the pc was in Dutch, and I got the same laptop in my school, and Belgium isnt as generous with loans as the US. and This is probably just from the state, which is even worse. My IT-teacher helped there for awhile and always complained@@antikommunistischaktion
Given the laptop's language settings and keyboard layout, I know he's from a western European country where tech illiteracy and incompetence is severely commonplace...
The fact that he (the student) knows the existence of Linux, makes him more competent that 95% of the IT admins in set country...
Not to mention the problem of tech illiterate ( IT ) management, that want's things their way without knowing or caring about any of the consequences...
Education IT admin here.
Here's the thing: Windows and all Microsoft products have been, and always will be, built for business. They can put a skin on something, add one or two functions and call it an "educational" product (I'm looking at you Teams), but at the end of the day, it is still built with semi-trusted adults in mind. The problem with students is that you can expect them to exploit the tiniest of cracks (I know as I was one of them), of which there are many, most of which we know about, and some we don't.
We are perpetually moulding a fork into a spoon, and it will never be perfect because it was never designed for this purpose. People saying we are understaffed and underpaid, you are 100% correct; the computer I use is amalgamated scavenged parts from PCs you broke, and no, the IT budget is not my budget.
Look, at the end of the day, every staff member, including me, has the responsibility to safeguard you. My job is to keep you digitally safe while in school. The computers are the way they are because they need to be capable of supporting teaching and learning, and when it's a free-for-all, it cannot be done. They are slow because there's only so much money for anything. We are doing the best we can with what we have, and we only want to make sure you can learn in a safe environment. And your thank you means a lot.
We had Chromebooks, which were even more network restricted, but it still managed to find a site that let me bypass that, playing games and watching unblocked RUclips
@@sd1gaming I attempted to crack my chromebook and bricked it. This was after I graduated.
It is apparently really straightforward to change a chromebook to linux
At the end of the day, it really isn't the school's business what a student does on their laptops while not in school, or even in school for that matter. You can't really be unsafe on the internet... By definition of actual danger. You can expose yourself to thinks that can create a risk for yourself, but by nature of the internet... You can not be put physically in danger simply by using it. Students should not have access to credit cards or otherwise... So the financial risks "should" be mitigated.
The argument that measures like these keep students "safe" is pure posturing. There is no purpose to most of these measures.
On the other hand, with computers that are on the same network, there's a greater risk to the network itself and to the data of connected devices, and servers. There is still a lot you can do to protect that network data and other computers without infringing on the rights of the students. Network scanners, and dpi are a few things.
At the end of the day the measures most companies do to protect their networks, can't be replicated in a school setting. Rather, in a school setting it is more beneficial for students to be able to screw up their devices and be forced to fix them themselves then it is to try to prevent that... Nevermind the fact that students shouldn't be using laptops in general, explicitly because it adds nothing to the educational experience. Rather it only detracts from it. Students need to be taught in class and one on one. They don't need the distraction of a pc to do their work. They need printouts, they need teachers that are involved and invested in the education of their students. And on a technological level, they don't need the school filtering what they access. Students need and deserve to seek outside information from sources that the school might not agree with. If a school let's say blocks fox news, but doesn't block msnbc or blocks pro-climate change sites but doesn't block site arguing against climate change, you have a problem. You no longer have education you have indoctrination.
In my school in Finland everyone got laptops for free and they had absolutely no restrictions on them. Full admin rights and no bios password. I think they even told us we can install Linux on them if we prefer. After graduating, they offered us to buy the laptop for 30€ which obviously (almost) everyone did. Still have mine as a backup linux laptop.
Linus Torvals being finnish i mean it would be an insult to force you to use Windows.
Time to add this to my list of countries I want to move to
omg luck
Nice, it was good that you got free laptops for your studies, but even better when you can just buy it completely for such a small amount! I'd have definitely bought it at €30 :D
I started school lately in Finland and the new computers they give for free don't have admins anymore.
To be honest you're the first person that managed to go past my "Dutch Detection System" in me, usually i can notice the Dutch accent cause i lived in the Netherlands for like 6 to 8 years but you're English Accent is quite good the only thing that gave it away was Windows🤣🤣
hahaha, that's what happens when you've been watching English RUclips videos since childhood!
I'm English and could not tell at all until I saw this comment.@@SandalChannel
yea same
Flemish*
@@1337WA Flemish is almost like Dutch
I'm not even surprised with these 'IT experts' from organizations.
My friend had police involved with her kid and the police wanted to investigate kid's laptop. Unfortunately, owner was dead.
Police took the laptop away for months and when they gave it back, they told her they are still trying to crack the password and how was she planning to crack it.
She gave me the laptop and I cracked it in 10~15 minutes. You don't even need to know the password or anything.
So yeah. IT experts.
😂lmao🤣
fed
And today in "That happened!"
10 years ago or so when I was still in school we used MacBooks running 10.5 Leopard.
The security of these things was hilariously bad. This was right when smartphones were starting to gain popularity and the school did not have free WiFi.
You could simply start the machine in single-user-mode (which is basically an emergency safe mode that brings you to a command line with full admin rights) and run a simple command that made the OS forget that the first time setup had already been ran.
When you then rebooted the machine, it would boot up as if you first started the OS with that fancy intro animation MacOS had back then and allowed you to set up a new admin account. From there on I was able to retrieve the WiFi password and shared it with some friends. They obviously noticed the unwanted guests and changed the password, but within 10 minutes I’d always get the new password again. This went on for a few months and then they introduced free WiFi.
As time went on, they never updated those machines so eventually they started becoming hard to use. You were stuck with a very old version of Safari that had very poor HTML5 support and couldn’t render websites properly. The version of Flash player that was installed (yeah that was still a thing) was also too old so pretty much anything interactive stopped working.
We told the IT department about this multiple times but they couldn’t care less…. So I continued using this trick so we could install a modern web browser and update Flash player so we could actually use the laptops for their intended purpose. It was pretty known that I knew how to “crack” these machines, but no one snitched as I was the one giving them the power to play Minecraft on it and watch RUclips. At some point I was just cracking MacBook after MacBook because IT refused to update the software.
This went on for years and IT could not care less, to the point where even teachers started asking me to crack their MacBook without snitching me to IT… Or possibly IT knew already and didn’t care. I mean I was essentially doing their job for them… With the downside that students were now playing games during class.
@@COOTJENZit's entirely possible lmao. I did it with my father's work laptop and gave myself admin
Story time. My school used crappy little laptops (Dell Latitude 3340), and basically locked down everything on it. Well, myself and a group of friends had recently discovered Warmane, or for those who aren't familiar with it, a World of Warcraft 3.3.5a (Wrath of the Lich King) private server. We wanted to all play it, but not everyone had a personal laptop they could bring from home. We did however, have the school laptops which surprisingly, could run it. Using a mix of Kali Linux and making our own VPN service (we were high schoolers, we weren't gonna pay for a VPN), we made a second partition on the hdd, and installed a second copy of Win 10 on each of our laptops and were able to run WoW (and any other game we wanted that would run on the hardware) on it.
The IT admins, by locking the laptops down, ended up teaching us more about computers, internet protocols and "hacking" than our entire computer science courses did.
why would the people paid to lie to you want you to be able to break the system? of course the computer science classes taught you nothing, that's all they're meant to do: lie to you
Precisely what did you do that required Kali?
@@davidturcotte831 If I remember correctly we used chntpw to unlock the built in admin account, and used that account to mess with the built in admin account. At first, I believe we just ran our stuff either off of that admin account or a second user we made, but eventually we just made that second partition so it was easier to clean up when we had to turn our laptops in at the end of the year.
Kali wasn't necessarily required for what we were doing, but it was a convenient collection of different software and just how we did it.
@@davidturcotte831 probably live boot for the partition manager. In which case the thing wasn't as locked down as he says it was. And then using the vpn to circumvent the schools locked down internet access.
@@blubblub3786
So nothing that required Kali. Nothing that couldn't be done better with Tails.
this is at least marginally better than the absurd Chromebooks they made us American students use for middle and high school.
For real like who even uses there school chrome book at home I’m sure most of us have a dramatically better windows computer at home.
@@jexanderarvelo3277 same except mine's a mac lol
a couple classmates at my high school were able to just do chrome://kill then chrome://hang on an extension code page and get unrestricted internet access
@@TG_1023 Bro you live in Luxembourg or what?
@@TG_1023They give every student a thousand dollar macbook?
As an actual School IT Support staff myself I want to say a few things, I feel I need to.
The OS is a part I want to address, especially if students are using them for 4 years straight when we get the laptops back we do not even turn them on apart from to check the display, we will re-image them using the school image as its basic practice to do so unless it is a chromebook. Also and this is only me personally, if i got a laptop from a student back with a custom OS i would not say anything because some of the limitations are god awful.
The BIOS, if you lock it with your own password we will never get it back and would have to throw the laptop away which is a shame but the truth, modern devices do not allow for a bios reset easily and sometimes its not even worth it. Also that was an oversight not to lock it.
Also the hidden security thing is terrible, and is a massive security flaw in the system as usually we should use a login based system or a single user distro as locking to mac addresses is very time consuming and annoying to do.
As a former cybersecurity analyst, my recommendation would be to have the WiFi connecting into/authenticating through RADIUS or some kind of VPN setup and simply removing the password entirely. Any machines connecting to the AP will have to supply a certificate or suchlike. If you don't have that, you're not authenticated.
That's far more secure than a password anyone can sniff, extract, or simply guess.
@@halfbakedproductions7887 oh absolutely yeah, for whatever reason where I work does not do that however from what I know we are planning to integrate that into the future network
At the middle school I went to the network was set up in a way that packets from any PC were essentially routed to all parts of the network. This meant that if one were to run a packet sniffer, one would get the passwords from essentially everyone connected including teachers (this was almost 20 years ago and encryption wasn't as widely used back then). We even managed to get the credentials for the system used by the teachers to input student grades at the end of the school year. Half of the computers on the network also had their entire hard drives shared without a password. Suffice to say, we didn't misuse this knowledge beyond pulling a couple harmless pranks, like for example writing a script that would change the background wallpaper on half of the schools computers to an image we uploaded.
My friend found out that that on websites that are blocked with a popup page from the school you could right click then "inspect" to see the page code, and he could see the whole list of search terms and banned words that would ping the school system if you were to search them up. It was funny.
The school system itself was so bad he was able to ping the server for fun just by opening a new tab, copy-paste, then enter-ing to search the term - leading to DDOSing the school by hand just from a crappy chromebook. The whole system shut down and for the whole day blocked websites were temporarily accessible.
For anyone getting into linux, I would not recommend manjaro as a first option since its known to have a bad history with how they manage their packages and I would recommend a distro like the debian based MX Linux or just standard arch (which is actually pretty easy to install now thanks to their guided installer) instead
I would NOT recommend pure Arch to a beginner 💀
@@sudoharunendeavour > manjaro
@@asdfghjklqzwxI know that, but why are you telling me this 😭 I started on endeavouros but I really don't recommend Arch or any Arch-based distro to ANY beginner.
@@sudoharun I'm sure nothing bad with pkgbuilds will ever happen
/s
Installed fedora as a first distro to a friend
She had no issues so far
Nice! Did this with my NSW laptop back in 2013 along with my mates. Bit different though, we had a locked bios so I had to force shutting the computer until it let me do a PC check, and at the end it would generate a txt file I could open in notepad. Used notepad's 'open file' dialog to make the on screen keyboard exe command prompt, then set the local account to admin like you did.
Crazy thing too is that we were the last year to get laptops so no teachers knew how to check if we'd cracked them so we all installed fresh versions of windows and got steam on there
I remember when we had to do the exams (midterms) in the Safe Exam Browser. From the moment I heard we have to use it I started to think how to circumvent it. No one will lock down my own PCs! I circumvented it by running the safe exam browser in a virtual machine and changing some VM configs so SEB doesn’t know it is a VM. Disclaimer - I did this for research purposes, not cheating. Maybe if I got the school PC (I used my own PC during covid), circumventing the security would be the first thing to do - I just can’t help myself
tell us how you did it
@@nick-me1ni sadly it was patched in later versions. Current version requires exactly 1 display - no more, no less. If you have 2 monitors for example, it should't start. When you are running it in virtual machine, you actually have 0 monitors - it won't start. I am still trying to figure it out. I am thinking about putting another GPU into the system and dedicate it to the VM and plugging a dummy HDMI display in it
@@branimirfilovski8388 why a dumby hdmi instead of using your own monitor?
@@millionare5446 an actualonitor also work I think. The tricky part is dedicating a GPU to VM
@@branimirfilovski8388i’ve set up my own custom VM for exams, it’s VirtualBox Windows 10 with Virtualization disabled, invisible highlight (for copying and pasting) and cross clipboard between vm and host
it’s good for proctored exams, maybe not lockdown browser
Dude I used the uni PCs to bruteforce the NTLM hash of the same PC, write cracked pass down on paper and hand it to the admins with evil smile.
When they finally (3rd or 4th attempt) made a large enough password to make EGB useless I just bruteforced the LM hash (yes they didn't disable) and purely guessed the rest of it.
Fun times.
What do you do now, just curious?
Are you in NSA now?😂
@@keylanoslokj1806This isn't hard hacking knowledge, networkchuck has a video on it
LMFAO
At my old middle school we had PHP programming courses, and for some reason the Apache/PHP instance on the school PCs ran as system. So much fuckery.
hmm the SSID and password of a school's wifi that im probably thousands of kilometers away from surely will come in handy someday
What do you mean by that exactly? 💀
If you have the bitlocker key, you can boot from Linux live USB and use it to remove/reset the administrator password or elevate your user account to local administrator. Then do whatever you want on the laptop. Personally. I would pull the drive and replace it with your own drive and format it to your liking. When its time to hand in the computer at the end of the year, replace their drive and hand it in.
Agreed he could have avoided 99% of this had he done that
It's MDM managed and Intune can knock the local account right back down to just a simple user, and very likely send an alert to the admin.
i did this once, they were smart enough to have a bios password but they didn't really have much else, so i just plugged in a windows usb, went into cmd, and messed around with windows files until i could change the administrator password
edit: didnt watch the video when i wrote this comment, funny that you did the exact same thing
I remember getting around installing Steam in a .zip file to bypass the administration password and being able to play Portal 2 on the school laptops that were given to me. It worked and ran at 15 fps 🤣
We got an upgraded computer lab with Pentium 4 cpus and discrete GPUs + LCD monitors when I was in 7th grade. I had two classes in there and being me, I was able to install snex9x, project64 and the Halo demo with no restrictions. We had some 24 player matches going on at times. I remember sniping my teacher out of a banshee one blood gulch and him flipping me off. It got out of hand where people were going to play during lunch and after school and the vice principal noticed. They weren't down with the violence and it had to end lmao. Fun times.
"YOUNG MAN, FUCK YOU!"
- Teacher, fuming
Ah, the laptop is intune managed. If the IT staff cared you would know by now, doing stuff like removing bitlocker or adding new local administrator accounts should be throwing alerts if they have it set up correctly. I dont work in a school environment though.
I dont know if you can do this without domain admin permissions but with local admin rights you might be able to add your domain account to the local administrator group.
There's no chance they would care unless management was really on their ass about it
My dude, it's this very geeking that is developing your technical skills more than the lessons.. Keep that enthusiasm you have
For the BIOS password: it just makes it a little bit harder, but still not completely impossible to bypass. For someone brave and determined enough they can always unplug the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS, or just pop out the hard drive, replace the OS with another computer, pop it back in.
Nope, not on Lenovo, HP and Dell's
The bios password is stored in a different place, resetting / removing battery won't help.
On HP's it even could lock the bios permanently, until the masterkey ( on external usb ) is inserted.
Not with all laptops not with all. For example the Lenovo Thinkpad x201i, if you remove the CMOS battery the machine is literally hard locked with a unknown password You cannot boot and you cannot go to BIOS. To get around it you literally have to short the BIOS chip WHILE BOOTING and then go into BIOS and short again so you can remove the lock in the BIOS... I had to go through this and FUCK LENOVO FOR EVEN THINKING OF THIS... I spent hours trying to fix it and I finally did it and the relief I got after the amount of pain I went through.
@@aleksandersats9577 Kind of the point of a BIOS password...
@@truepppBut they failed it shows these security measures can't stop someone with enough time and dedication
@@trueppp yeah but not if it gets set to a random password even if it didnt have one before just for resetting the bios
the thing is even with this level of security it still works 99% of the time, the fact is that the general student is ignorant enough of these things, only people with either good pc skills, geeks, word of mouth, or even sheer willpower can and not everyone is like that
I did the same for my school iPad, which had Apple's mobile device management (MDM) enabled. After 3 hours of messing around I had figured out, that I could just remove it by modifying the HTTP traffic between the MDM server and the device using a proxy. Fun stuff!
Funny, when you mentioned Linux I was like "why didn't he just make a new local admin with a windows boot media?" then 4:00 came around...
You have to pay to rent one of these it’s ridiculous.
This makes me think back to when the IT staff put a message in bold yellow that these computers are not for playing games and my friends hacked in and changed it to say different...
I remember using a VPN to bypass network filters at my school. Of course, you couldn't download anything because of that, so instead I just used a flash drive that had the setup and installed it from there (for some reason my school allowed you to install stuff, but they probably didn't think much of it, because it's not like you could download anything anyway). Never got caught.
I was on my schools IT’s good side so much the asked me to come back next year to work for them lol, safe to say I got anything I wanted installed when I needed it so it was basically my laptop anyways.
Also, dear god man the damage you have probably caused to countless school networks, I both praise you for taking initiative to grant yourself more freedom but also curse you for the work ima be doing next year.
Used to bring a persistent live Linux flash drive to school in high school to fuck around without the teacher being able to see my screen with their surveillance software
Don't remember the distro, I think it was probably Kubuntu 14.04-16.04. Unfortunately, this was pre-Proton, so there weren't that many games I could easily play but I remember playing a lot of Minecraft, SPORE and SuperTuxKart since they were trivial to run. Skyrim and other more modern games for the time were possible but required a lot of tweaking in WINE
i had a chromebook several years ago, and when i was still required to use it, i unintentionally figured out that the browser monitoring software i was using wouldnt function properly and just reported i was "offline" if i left my PC at home turned on with some tabs open on the same account. This never became a problem again when i started using my own laptop and ran everything on firefox instead of chrome
My school has a bunch of security measures when it comes to the OS but they didn't use a bitlocker for our School laptop so I can just reset windows or install Linux whenever I wanted! Back in 8th grade I used to reset people's laptops for a couple bucks But I ended up stopping because someone tried to snitch on me!
If I was did the same thing I would delete their school account (and maybe some other accounts like Google or Microsoft if there password is bad enough). That'll show them who's boss
@@duplicake4054lmao
i work for a company that provisions laptops for schools and such, we can see everything you do on them unless you've fresh installed windows without the profile and even then we can see that your device has gone off line and would be enquiring as to why. Last week i had to call an engineer to tell him we knew he was constantly looking at adult sites and issue him with a final warning before we disable his laptop! WHICH he 100% needs for work and would have to explain why its dead.
Last year the engineering classroom at my school got new computers. Guess what? Same thing, they forgot to set a bios password. I ran off of a portable copy of ubuntu the whole year lol
My schools IT department is pretty stupid too, they gave everyone a Testing account and for some reason it had administrator privileges (you had to do a couple things to get it working because of how they set it up), it also might have been a domain admin too.
Now, they will be going to patch it up.
And then we won’t be able to play and run what we want.
Bro you have truly blown your trumpet.
You can still utilize security flaws in the OS to do this stuff with Windows recovery admin cmd, usb boot, or flat out resetting the system.
Just let people do with their device what they want when they payed for it.
The school can just reflash Windows after returning the laptop.
This takes me back. In my high school they supplied us with laptops that didn't have admin access, locked customization, "blocked" sites (they just remapped the domains to localhost), and a whole bunch of other stuff that made it just impossible to use the laptop in any personal capacity.
So in the first 24 hours of the laptops being handed out each year, everyone would go to a dedicated file that was available for a few weeks (on the school NAS) made by myself & some friend filled with scripts & tools to remove whatever restrictions they implemented to block us between now & the year prior. It actually reached the point the IT department started giving me a laptop without restrictions in hopes it was stop me from finding/making & sharing tools to others. Needless to say, it didn't stop me & in my final year I decided to leave the file up and let the years below me know the name of in hopes they would still be valid for years to come
As someone who was an IT assistant at a school over the summer, I give a thumbs up, nice work! 👍
if your curious yeah especially at schools usually security is bad we just have the bare minimum in without being too easy lol
Had a similar situation, except the bios on the computers at my school were password protected.
Didn't really care though, just ripped the SSD out of one of the more high spec CAD computers (very gently) and plugged in my portable drive with Windows installed and it automatically booted to it. It wasn't all that slow and even if Steam was blocked and throttled on the network I could sometimes squeak out enough bandwidth for a game or just install it at home and bring it with.
Glad you had fun, def a great example of how InfoSec is needed on so many levels, but frankly, we're not always paid enough to care
also with how many of us got our start circumventing parental restrictions there's a non zero percent chance this oversight was left in to let some student experience that rite of passage for themselves
So when i was in high school i worked for the IT team senior year. The one thing that comes to mind about bad IT management is one of the Sr, Admins had lost a usb with all kinds of IT stuff but the biggest Facepalm was all the system passwords where on it, From Bios passwords to Root server passwords.
school IT limits are incredibly fun to get around. espicially when youre supposed to be yknow. actually doing stuff.
that's a lucky oversight
my middle school's admins were so strict that even though i got to keep the "laptop" and did the unlocking procedure correctly, it's still locked to this day (i'm in university already) and the only way possible to access it besides changing the bios password (which i cannot do) is by changing the hardware itself
maybe there's an exploit but i didn't get back to it in a very long time
In my Senior year, some update to the software made us unable to use USB DRIVES. They never told us that it was going to happen, and it made transferring actual school files a lot more annoying, but i understand why they did it...
That's probably just done through a GPO rule from the windows domain server. Definitely could've bypassed that with admin priviledges.
I did this to my school laptop in 9th grade. In 11th grade now and it’s my main laptop. Don’t ask how I still have it even after switching schools…
Many many years ago (early 90s I think) the high school I was at had a computer lab with macs of some kind (not sure which model, it was one of the beige ones though) that ran software called At Ease (designed to lock the systems down and limit what you could run). But it was possible to use a feature in one of the Microsoft Office apps to browse to the location of the At Ease program file and delete it and defeat the production. Definitely not the fault of anyone on the IT team, just strange that the developers of the software didn't stop the software's main program file from being deleted...
You've rolled so many great tricks into one convenient, entertaining video. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge, device freedom should be something everyone wants.
I got past the school laptop blocks on mine back in the day
we got given windows vista / 7 machines
everything was locked to shit on it
i realized you could get into system recovery if u purposely caused it to have an issue (only way to, couldnt get there through any shortcuts) so if you pulled out the battery mid boot it would go there next time around
After it did its thing you could see the results which would open up a notepad document pre-boot.
you could navigate to system32, replace the stickykeys executable with a copy of cmd
log in then log out, can then alter your account through cmd to be admin, use that to then get rid of all the block crap installed on it
I got caught and got in so much crap for it lmfao cause i helped others out who blabbed.
These laptops keep in mind the government here in australia claimed, for some absurd reason were unhackable.
I did something similar with my school laptop, I used both a portable Windows install and an arch Linux install on an external drive. I always say, if you have physical unrestrained access to a PC you will crack it, nothing you can do
@@lurch789 ? Sorry I don't understand what you mean
Our school is using one ftp server where all windows user profiles are stored. I just periodically filled that thing up with a neat powershell script and stopped every person in the school from being able to open or save any files
still can't believe i met one of my most awesome friends from a school pc video 😁😁😁
Hm
For us we were given a laptop that we were supposed to install wkndows on. If you were to download windows the normal way, ir would download windows 11 as a student OS pre installing all security measures psswords and programs that youd use through out the year.
Fortunately for me, there was a simple button in the installer called "don't install windows as a student" which allowed mye full access to the computer, of course without the required programs reinstalled but those were free or I could download it with my school license externally later anyway.
Didn' need any knowledge on how to do anything, managed to avoid windows 11 and all security measures with the click of a single button. When I have to return it, I'm planning to wipe the drive and leave it on the installation menu for windows just like how I was given it.
Edit: If I remember correctly I watched a friend of mine who didn't do what I did type "Make me an admin" in the search bar and it literally gave him full access to the computer as well.
My middle school's computers are really easy to get around. They DID have a lock on the bios, but you could still change the boot order soo... not sure what the point of the BIOS lock was. The laptops aren't that locked down, but it took me a while to mess with them because they had to stay at school meaning I couldn't take them home (Whenever it loaded into bios it made a LOUD beeping noise so I got a lot of dirty looks). They don't actually block all that much tho, so after messing around with some live-usbs (Ubuntu because it had Safe Boot on), I just installed a portable version of Steam, Minecraft, Undertale etc. really easy actually. They for some reason left ONE version of powershell open a random one aswell (Powershell ISE (x86)) for some reason.
I had my IT admins not know about having windows on a mac and they were so clueless i had to explain it to them for over 10 minutes...
Bios Passwords dont restrict the acces on the BIOS entirely. You can reset it if you press a tiny button on your mainboard from your laptop.
Wait, really? That’s neat, time for a little trolling 😈.
Its time we start gaming on our work machines! Congrats on your 1000th subscriber :)
Saying "I use arch" while using manjaro has to be the biggest insult you could make for arch users
One of the only tech videos I've seen with a AZERTY keyboard 😮
I absolutely despise azerty, but that's what Belgium uses by default sadly :/
@@SandalChanneloh.. Why do you think Belgium adopted AZERTY?
From what I can find online the exact origins are unknown, but it seems to be a hybrid of an old French typewriter layout and qwerty.
@@SandalChannelIt's interesting how history still amuses us.
Actually, Lenovo machines do allow admins to set the BIOS password remotely - but ONLY if there was already a password manually set. Which in your case there wasn't, so never mind. My guess is the password needs to be set because you'd need the old password as authentication for creating the new one.
I'm not sure what the situation is with other laptop brands, although I'd imagine enterprise-grade vendors like Dell would be able to do that as well.
The WiFi could also be better secured via certificates or simply have it pointing into a VPN meaning you could go no further unless you were authenticated.
One weekend my college decided to set up NAC (network access control) on their wired network.
I came in the next day and it took me 10-20 min to bypass it.
They literally just whitelisted certain MAC addresses belonging to the college computers, so I just cloned one of those devices and connected.
All restrictions on what sites you can access are done through DNS and only locally on the college computers, so I literally just have unrestricted access to the internet, even tor works.
Ill disclose it to them once they finally fix the student wifi.
I think one of our shenanigans during vocational school was turning the firewall against the school's monitoring software to do what ever we wanted on the machines
Genshin Impact works fine on Linux I've been playing it for weeks using Bottles, which automates setting up a wine environment with gaming patches applied. I use Gentoo with GNOME, though this probably doesn't matter. It was honestly a breeze to set up, the only problem I had was some crazy visual glitches at first but I just had to toggle "Post-Processing Effects" in the Bottle setting and it worked fine since.
yeah they....seem to completely authorize Wine/Proton now, we used to need patches but now it just works
you should probably be using "An Anime Game Launcher" instead
@@glazedbelmont YWN.
I’m from the US and on our school laptops it will let you completely reset the laptop for some reason( idk why? ) through windows troubleshoot. If you do so it will reset the computer and attempt to add you to the schools services, when it can’t it gives up and dies. All you have to do to get past this is literally just open terminal, type explorer to open Edge or internet explorer and download windows 10 22H2 update tool and when it updates it will always make an account if there isn’t one present and log you in as admin, just go through normal setup and remove azure accounts, and your done!
I remember getting admin access through the repair process when you power on and off the windows 7 laptop really quickly.
Just rename sethc to cmd and you're good.
Ahh. Good times.
Got caught though.
Ahhh a Intune enrolled device. To answer the following question: why are they giving us the bitlocker key: well they enabled that feature on purpose. When there is a problem with the security chip also known as tpm you still have access to the bitlocker Recover key. Bitlocker wasn't enabled to keep the end user (you) from doing anything but to keep your data save when someone stole your laptop. You can only access the keys from the laptops where you are the primary user on.
Also disabling bitlocker will make you device not compliant if they have enabled that check in intune. Also! Id you have set some policies regarding conditional access you even could loss access to the school network, your files, and the ability to sign in. Butt that depends on the school system admins.
Have fun with your device!
- It admin (not from your school)
I've been out of schooling for a long time now but I remember "borrowing" school laptops like you would library books, so it's absurd to me that schools out there are charging students to rent laptops from them now. Letting students outright buy a laptop through them would still be iffy but at least that'd be a little more understandable. Bizarre.
My school uses iPads with a keyboard (I swear im in highschool) and all I did was swap out my iPad with a iPad that looked exactly like the school one and had the same apps wallpaper etc... but I had full permissions on this one. I also did the same wifi trick on one of the school dell computers in the computer lab.
IT "professionals"
- no BIOS password
- end-user accessible bitlocker keys
- outsmarted by 6th year student who uses *shudder* Manjaro.
they say they professionals when I able to fix some of their problems without even asking them
" you can`t learn if you don`t try yourself don`t tell IT before trying if you can fix it"
Only thing that the admin did right is for forbidding genshiet😂
What if all the security measurements are actually like this on purpose?
Giving loopholes for students to try and gain access over their machines. Learning about security in the process.
Yes, exactly like that one exam episode in Naruto.
You give these schools too much credit 😂 The Teachers and/or staff aren't that smart (If they were they wouldn't be dealing with snot-nose brats for essentially indentured servitude pay ((College Professors on the other hand make good money mainly it's mostly public school teachers getting shafted))
It's funny how this one simple thing that we did when we got our school laptops back in 2011 is still the same flaw 12 years later..
I used that "make admin account from installer" bypass once when an update somehow locked me out of my account. Ironically, that was also what prompted me to install linux on the thing.
I had a not pleasant time in high school and my senior year was the first year we had Chromebooks so there was no policy on how we had to return them other than they couldn't be damaged. Luckily for me, being completely disassembled and being damaged are two different things apparently.
I have a school laptop as well but my IT department is a little better at stopping this shenanigans, so I took it as my personal mission to hack that little Microsoft Surface go. I found that if you use a Linux bootable usb (with Gnome preferably) you have a disk utility, with that you can just click format disk with or without bitlocker and reinstall windows! I immediately started selling that exploit at school and I (no joke) made hundreds of dollars, people wanted to get admin rights and blast away school bloatware. I made bank🎉
It feels like I'm back at school, circumventing security again (hello 2005). I'm glad kids are still doing this!
I was working as an IT in my elementary school as a part of my IT high school. IT people in my work place dont even know the wifi passwords / Network domain login info, so we had to climb up a ladder to reset a router. Dont worry, they aint as good in technology.
I spent more time in school jailbreaking than actually paying attention in computer classes.
The head of Science were none too pleased when he found out students had full read write access to the Science Shared drive.
It was hidden but you could access it if you knew the address, a fantastic way to avoid the spyware watching your disk, and bonus storage! As our disks were 10GB each.
I remember doing this back in highschool. Back then we used something called "crosh" and "crouton," and you could install stuff like XFCE, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint. Was really great for playing Minecraft during class.😂
When the IT professionals watch this video and realize that the students are more intelligent than they are:💀💀💀
LMAO, thats not how it is at all. I take offense as an IT Admin. Read my comment above, but basically the policies put in place are not there with power users in mind and that is not what we are trying to prevent.
@@djust270 The IT 'professionals' blocked command prompt and PowerShell but forgot to disable the group policy editor. I re-enabled command prompt and PowerShell really easily because they messed up. Also, they can't program (whereas I can program in JavaScript and I'm learning Python).
@@duplicake4054 You are obviously smart. You should get a career in IT. It pays very well.
@@djust270 😊 Thanks! I'n not old enough yet though (i'm 13)
@@duplicake4054 I was like you at 13. I'm 39 now, still game 🎮 but do IT professionally. I get paid very well without the need for a college degree.
Guy explaining security without knowing what real security is. "After I was logged in I was able to deactivate bitlocker with my admin rights."
pretty interesting
some time ago I found an old laptop from a family member who didn't return it
and had a hard time getting rid of the encryption stuff, and the linked microsoft account and school domain couldn't be removed no matter what I tried
best I could do is replace the drive, wipe it(along with the entire bitlocker) on another pc, then reinstall windows, the bios wasn't actually locked either :)
I remember the time I circumvented the limitations on my school laptop.
I managed to get cmd running using a batch script, then I managed to get steam working by installing it to a different location that wasn't the default one (since the default one was blocked), then I somehow managed to give myself admin... I don't remember how, but it was fun.
I have a School Windows Tablet with Windows 11 and we don't have admin restrictions, bitlocker or bios locks. I had games like csgo, valorant and even league of legends on the PC.
As a school IT admin, do whatever you want. We lock it down for compliance purposes and if you come crying about things not working, we're just going to re-image it.
The majority of kids that come to me are 'I'm using linux and i can't do '. Thats why standard operating environments exist.
I'm not going to waste time troubleshooting, I'll just reimage.
You're not 'smart', we just have better things to do, like protecting core services from actual threats, not hunting kids that want to play games on steam.
EDIT: I will note when I was in HS I cracked the local admin pw on my sisters school laptop with ophcrack. it was 'marvin' turns out that was the same pw they used for their servers and everything else.. so i get the allure.
Word of Caution: DO NOT TAMPER WITH COMPUTERS YOU DO NOT OWN. There may be serious consequences and you should not even consider doing something like this on any work computer. The consequences in that case are vastly worse. From termination of employment to civil / criminal / legal consequences. If you think IT won't notice the system has been tampered with; think again. The latest security tools are remarkable. IT Security may be notified within mere minutes of a change. Perhaps not an educational institution but certainly in the private sector where IT security is taken far more seriously.
I do see the concern, but this is a school computer, with obviously bad security to the point that this sort of thing would likely not be noticed
If this was a shared device, I would advise NOT being the most recent user to login to it, to have logged into that OS installation at all, then it might be fine to "ethically" screw with
But also be careful on personally loaned out devices
Also, people doing this sort of stuff are much less likely to install malware or anything than the average work computer user
lol
Lol. A school computer. Hack those things right open lol.
@Sqaaakoi that doesn't make sense. "Sorry officer, I broke in to his house because he had cheap locks". Also they might have bad security now, but they might install crowdstrike on there tomorrow, and everyone who is doing this stuff is going to be collectively nailed.
@@cansofcoke Yeah, I used to work in cybersecurity and I just wanted to slap anyone who said "They deserved to be hacked because their security was so awful". What a monumentally crap line of reasoning that is. Let's see how you like it when I find an open window at your place, climb in and steal your PS5 and also your car because you left the keys in an obvious place?
Oh wait you wouldn't like it and you would inform the police, fully expecting them to help you and recover your stuff. But you "deserved" to be the victim of a crime because you failed to secure your home because you simply forgot? Of course you don't deserve that. Nobody does.
So why does the owner of a hacked IT system "deserve it"?
In my school, we have this restriction software (NetSupport School) that the teacher uses to monitor us in the IT class. So how did I get around it? Open Task Manager, right click the process, "End process tree". Like, at this point just go to each student individually to check assignments.
Sadly the task manager is disabled by administrators in my district but my IT classes also use NetSupport School
Even if that didn't exist you could just open the laptop up, remove the SSD put it into another computer, wipe the OS and the boot loader from the disk and re-install the OS. Schools don't realize you cannot control a machine you don't physically have. No matter how much restriction you put as long as it is digital it is shitty.
So i was in the same situation, but the BIOS is locked and i don't need to hand it in.
So yeah i first managed to create a local admin account at first login by not having any wifi network in the area, it's just that i wanted to not have to connect to a Microsoft account since i already installed Windows before and that part is a pain. So that was deceptively easy, i kept it like that a few months, but i eventually started getting tired of the org. limitations and Windows itself since using WSL was easier for the amateur dev i was doing.
So with the conditions in mind, i just took out the M.2 drive and put it in my tower, installed Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 then transitioned to Kubuntu) and put it back in.
I also did the same thing to a friend's computer, i tried to setup dual boot with GRUB but secure boot blocked it from loading Windows strangely.
So yeah now i, and my friend, can do everything we want, i am typing this on it, the next step is to Libreboot it.
P.S. : There was also Bitlocker but ig since i had an admin account and then i wiped the drive i never encountered it.
Man, when I had a school laptop, it was the most locked down thing ever. BIOS had password, apps that needed administrator were blocked, and they even forced a custom wallpaper.
Now if this stuff is happening, imagine the things I could do..
Back in high school 14 years ago we didnt have laptops at all. Only me and two of my mates had them, we weren't supposed to but we did anyway, and we used them exclusively to mess around with linux.
I got on to the school's wifi by lifting the network certificate from my english teachers laptop.
I stopped using school laptops when half of them had missing keys and were never charged.
i remember i think a year or two ago i just used at windows install usb to swap out utilman exe for cmd in sys32 and used the admin cmd from the accessability button on lock screen to make a new admin account and used that on the same ol windows install
As someone who was #1 on the IT teams Most Wanted list I can tell you that they don't really care that much about making stuff like this uncrackable, anyone who can do stuff like this isn't likely to do anything seriously bad and the IT team is likely too busy with stuff they aren't' paid enough to do.
When I started 7th grade, everyone got to borrow brand spanking new macbook pros (mid 2012 model) for free all through to the end of 9th grade. Nothing was locked down. Not even the school wifi. A few years later they started blocking some websites, like those hosting adult "hugging" videos.
fun fact you can sometimes straight up retreive the bitlocker password from command prompt / powershell in the recovery menu (if you can already change the boot order as such, but you can also manage it if you can create a boot loop that causes bitlocker to go into the bitlocker recovery/restore menu
locked myself out of one of my own bitlocked machines once and was deeply displeased to find out about that
Man the cmd takes me back. I remember doing that to a middle school desktop but I didn't even need an installer because of how Windows 7 startup repair wasn't fully automatic. I stopped after that though because I knew to not do regrettable stuff on school pcs. Another kid didn't and they got suspended after getting all the account pswds :/. Also I wish I knew about the wifi thing. I def would've tried to get the staff only wifi password.