This is all very amusing, but I have the other side of the story. A close relative of mine was the systems administrator for a large high school. The amount of grey hairs that sprouted in the few years they were in the job due to wannabe hero high school hackers is testament to how hard it is to keep a stable system running when you've got scores of hormonal hackers trying to outdo each other.
While this page tells of succesful hacks, it doesn't mention all the screw-ups whereby the payload didn't work but caused major problems with the school computers. Nor does it tell of the systems admin getting chewed out by school management for failing to play whack-a-mole properly.
By far the most common route of hacking was getting a teachers password, which was usually either easily guessed, or worse, written down in a notebook in the drawer.
As for me, I found that in university we had computer-based testing for weekly lab classes. When you submitted your answers, it printed the results and showed you where you were wrong.
We found that if we yanked the power cable on the workstation after the print job was submitted and the printer started, the results didn't commit to the database, you'd get a printout of the answers but your score wasn't saved. So then you'd just take the test again, using your printed answers as a guide.
That reminds me of the only "hack" I recall doing when I was younger. Back then, many BBS systems had 10/1 download/upload ratios enforced. I found that if you aborted an Xmodem download on the last block, you would still get the whole file (the block would finish transferring) but it wouldn't send the acknowledgement back to the BBS. I would just look like a failed download, and wouldn't count against your ratio. I think I filled up some 50 or so floppies that summer (and had the phone bill to match).
Other than that, I was never good at most hacking. I was into writing code, and working with algorithms, but I never got the knack on how to bypass security systems (I also didn't have any other computer savvy friends back then either). But it did help that I had an office job (which involved using my PC talents on the side) from the age of 15 on up. Kept me too busy making money to worry about side projects.
While this page tells of succesful hacks, it doesn't mention all the screw-ups whereby the payload didn't work but caused major problems with the school computers. Nor does it tell of the systems admin getting chewed out by school management for failing to play whack-a-mole properly.
By far the most common route of hacking was getting a teachers password, which was usually either easily guessed, or worse, written down in a notebook in the drawer.
As for me, I found that in university we had computer-based testing for weekly lab classes. When you submitted your answers, it printed the results and showed you where you were wrong.
We found that if we yanked the power cable on the workstation after the print job was submitted and the printer started, the results didn't commit to the database, you'd get a printout of the answers but your score wasn't saved. So then you'd just take the test again, using your printed answers as a guide.