MovieChat Forums > WarGames (1983) Discussion > Question about the hacking in to the sch...

Question about the hacking in to the school computer

posted 10 years ago by savair1
14 replies | jump to latest

This also happened in Ferris Buellers day off another Broderick film with Broderick's character doing it. But my question is how realistic is that to do this. Almost every person that I have ever spoke to who was a hacker had the iq of a carrot. I mean they were always liars and to be honest if your smart enough to hack in to a computer wouldn't you be smart enough to get the grades the right way anyway. I have never heard of school computers being hacked in to at least no successful attempts. For example, don't teachers know the students enough to where if I say to you , your not graduating and you show up on graduation day I mean wouldn't that look wierd?

[–] Catnip86 10 years ago

Some kids only do well (or try to) only in the classes they care about. So a person who doesn't care about biology wouldn't really try in biology.

I would think that the teachers approve the final grades though. And would notice if they knew a kid was failing and suddenly had an "A"

[–] chouse1020 10 years ago

Almost every person that I have ever spoke to who was a hacker had the iq of a carrot

Simple fact... they weren't hackers. They were probably what we call "script kiddies".

Hacker/geek really just implies strong computer abilities, generally with a lot of coding and debugging skills (not just able to use a computer proficiently). People using that term to describe themselves if they can't code in at least a dozen languages makes real geeks laugh... I'm well over two dozen languages myself, so I get to use the term to describe myself. The punk who can install a USB printer and thinks that means they have "mad skillz" because of that does not.

What you're referring to would be called "cracker"... i.e. somebody who had the advanced skills to actually break into systems using means they discovered themselves.

Script kiddies have no skills, and just pretend they know what they're doing. they call themselves hackers, geeks, crackers, etc - but only really know how to run software written by other people in order to break into systems.

[–] savair1 10 years ago

Ok the guy I knew got a degree in computer science but was a compulsive liar. Said all kinds of things that were not true and bragged about how he had broken in to Nasa. But he could not install a modem in my computer it was a 56k modem

[–] Kevlar281 10 years ago

If you recall the grade changing scene it shows that David has an A in Trigonometry. That doesn't make him "smart" but I think it's a good indication that he can excel in classes that he enjoys/interest him.

Also, this quote: "He's intelligent, but an under-achiever..." sums up David's character pretty well.

I knew a lot of kids in high school that were classic underachievers but really excelled when they got to college where they could pick their own classes and their owns schedules.

[–] asherp 10 years ago

There are a few questions here...Is this type of hacking possible? Would he get caught? Why didn't he just get the grades?

That type of hacking was completely possible back in the day...Passwords were shared and not always tied to user names....The only question is would the school have a modem exposed to the public phone network? But there would have been lots of reasons to have the grade server on the phone system....So the support company could get in...So the school superintendent could log on...That kind of stuff.

For a system like that you have to assume that people really didn't have home computers...and a server like that used a dumb terminal not a computer.

So to get in a hacker would need a home PC of some sort, a modem, a terminal emulator, the phone number of the server, and a password....not so complicated.

Would he get caught is a bit trickier....not likely...unless he changed so many grades that it raised red flags all over the place...Not as if anyone was going to look at the server's log files...if they existed they would be on TAPE....perhaps the slowest clumsiest backup medium ever (leave me alone about punch cards). And could a teacher have seen his grades after they were submitted? Sure....but why would the teacher look?

And why didn't he get the grades? Because school is boring....but playing cloak and dagger hacker stuff is fun. How many people enjoy being in luxury boxes at a ball game? Even though its further away from the game....its fun to feel privileged.

[–] ktyson9426 10 years ago

First, you have to consider that security at the time this movie was made was much different. What was considered secure in 1983 would definitely be considered insecure by today's standards.

If you watched, the school passwords were not only written down, they were accessible to anyone who knew where they were. On top of that they were human readable (i.e. pencil, paper, etc), which is a huge violation of password security by today's standards. These issues in the movie were probably very common in 1983. Hell, even in today's IT environments systems are installed with default passwords like Admin/Admin.

Logging of user log in's in 1983, for something like a high school server, was probably minimal at best. Unless some huge red flag went up, I doubt an Admin of a high schools servers would have been monitoring who was logging in with any regularity. Any kind of audit trail would have been limited to commands like "last" & "history". So I've never had any issue with hacking the schools computers as a plot point in the movie.

Once again, I think education today is different than education in the early 80's. I don't think it's that big of a deal to think that David's character was much smarter than was reflected in his grades. In the 70's & 80's, smart kids would wind up in classes that didn't challenge them at all, and they'd just get bored and not pay attention. They'd do poorly and their grades would make it look like they weren't that bright.

And depending on the context someone told me, I doubt if I would believe if someone told me they were a hacker. If they worked in the computer industry, or were a math or computer science major then that would be different. If it's just some slacker kid working at Target? nope... my guess is they mod'ed their xbox and decided they were a hacker. I mean people tell the dumbest lies... lol... I've probably had no less than 10 guys tell me they were retired Navy Seals. That doesn't make it so.... I mean no one tells lies about being an Exterminator or a Garbage collector.

Actually, the biggest technical issue I have with the movie (Other than the whole A.I. thing) was when WOPR/Joshua was trying to brute force the launch codes. In the movie WOPR/Joshua got them one character at a time. Which just isn't how brute forcing of passwords work. But I've always loved this movie so I just look the other way on it.

And just google "high school computers hacked" and you'll see it does happen.

[–] joelreitzloff 10 years ago

i did it with my friend in 97. he was in charge of the fledgling network/school scene so he knew the admin pass was something easy like aaa (i think) and there were no restrictions on browsing all the network drives for any users, including ones from entirely other schools in the district. some awesome things we did, in 1 day, were:

get all the locker combinations

get access to report card and tardy scores (we couldn't edit these due to the single smart fuction they had which gave the priciple a message on his pc that scores were changed unexpactedly) we could have if we used the teachers pc from the teachers room during a time when he were editing them though but that never happened.

we also saved the apps and data to a disk and brought them home and printed out all the locker coms. were were too nice to do any real theft. that was a little beyond our hackers' ethic but were were definately not angels.

we logged in as another student and sent a network instant message to our old middle school teacher from the school down the street saying something like "what do you think of me now? BOZO". he was the computer teacher and always called us bozos and said we'd never amount to anything. we knew this'd drive him crazy cuz he thought he was the man.

we found a way to send a global instant message to every PC in the school district so we sent a vulgar one, also under the name of the kid we hated and so impersonated. immediately after this message the pa called the principle to the office and we knew it worked lol. then they came to the room and pulled the kid out (we knew he had to be in the room at the same time. they either believed him and didnt realize we would have been in the same room, or they didnt believe him.

... this was probably a rare case. i could already program better than most people who write software today, and my buddy was amazing with networks. he had the inside scoop. that's really where the best hacking happens as it can be relatively safely done and you can learn the ins and outs with less risk to see what you can get away with. then when youve had your fun either move on or do something hilarious to make a statement ;p

just too bad there were no school sprinkler systems like in Hackers ;D

[–] shoobe01-1 9 years ago

I want to second this. Graduated high school in 1988. NO ONE at the district or schools understood the risks of computer systems. I worked, several times, on school stuff on administrator computers. Unattended. For hours. I could see — and could have easily modified or stolen — stuff that I was not allowed to.

I knew at least two people who had cracked (often, no cracking per se) the systems remotely and grabbed key data or had access not unlike that shown in the movie. Most didn't change things, as there clearly ways it would be discovered like paper records, etc.

In opposition to some posts above, there were no script kiddies, as it was before this stuff was readily available as turnkey tools. A few people shared techniques or snippets of code, but you had to know where to find it (much harder!) and a good little bit of how systems work and how to write code yourself to get them to work.

[–] residentevil6901 9 years ago

This was the early 80's around the time of the home console video game crash but those early computer games had no copy right protection so you could just make a copy and share it with everyone. I would imagine the school computers were probably pretty easy to hack into back then. I sure wish I knew how to do it back then lol.

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] okc_rn 8 years ago

The movie was set in 1983. The computer he was using was a home brew IMSEI 8080. A whopping 8 bit computer with limited instructions. Even at that time, it was not state of the art. . Apple II was enons above it.

Many on line computer systems still used 300 baud or 1200 baud modems. Little security was in place as so few had access to such systems, but things were starting to change. . .