using nmap at my school

So I'm not going to claim that I was some sort of prodigy when I was at school. Actually quite the opposite. I basically tried to skip everything I thought that was boring, which was most things. A lot of the time I would try and get my laptop out and work on some other project, probably the project I was building for my school at the time [add link here when I make that article]. During this time, I was exploring what it meant to program and create something out of code. I did this myself, not in a classroom. The first time I ever made an API call was kind of the tipping point for me, a point in my life where I can say I wanted to be a software developer, but this just opened the floodgates on exploring different ideas and technologies to make cool shit.

A lot of this "idle" time was spent exploring around. At this point in my life, I am still in high school, still attending some dumb digital class that doesn't interest me, but then I think of something. A lot of the stuff I have been learning around web development can be used to, I don't know, look around.. Things like dev tools give you a peak into what's happening behind the scenes of websites, and I could understand what was going on, since I knew this language already from creating my own websites.

This lead to me basically looking around things when I was bored. I was almost always bored at - you guessed it - school. So anyway skip to some lunchtime in the library. I am sitting with my friend Liam at the back table, sort of hunched over exploring different tools I can use on my laptop. I discovered a software called nmap, which allows you to ping devices on the same network to see what ports are open and what devices are running locally. This is actually quite harmless and doesn't really hint as "hacking", it's just like looking in a phone book, you can see everyones numbers, but it's only annoying if you start calling them.

My school was not anything special. A public ran, run of the mill school in a small town in New Zealand in 2018. So you can guess the network security wasn't fort knox. The sheer amount of devices that came back from the scan of IP addresses was overwhelming. I felt like a kid in a candy store. But I necessarily didn't really know what this all meant. I started exploring, and found a lot of the devices basically meant nothing. I could see the name, see the device type, but nothing would actually be open or exploitable, until I hit the motherload..

Once device stood out, RICOH M C2000 (exact name I don't remember, but something like this). I checked the ports on this bad boy and sure enough, an open web server. Surely there was a password right? Something to stop literally any student on the network from accessing this seemingly innocent printer? Nope. I think it might've been admin:admin, or just nothing, but to 17 year old me, this was the absolute jackpot.

I felt like I was not meant to be doing what I was doing, and that I was on some secret mission to learn everything about this printer.

I found out that it resided in the PE Teachers office, and that it was a fully fledged office printer, not just some shitty desk one, but this was so absolutely interesting to me, like I had "hacked" the network, but I don't think this is technically hacking, just dumb security.

I basically said goodbye to school printer credit, and started using this one, but there was one problem, the location. I would basically have to walk past potentially 3-5 PE teachers to reach this printer. I had one trick up my sleeve however, I was a Year 13 at the time. In New Zealand (and I assume other parts of the world), being in the last year of school basically gives you ultimate power to do what you want. At this point, I had major cred in the school, I had built a system for them already and all the teachers basically knew me as slightly above the law around there.

So, I walk up to the office door in the gym, and put on the most confident face I have ever pulled off. I act like I own the place, strolling in like I am a regular employee. I know where the printer is, I know what it looks like, I know what I am expecting in there. I turn the door knob and someone comes up to the door, almost to stop me, I lock eyes with him and have a semi panic attack. He opens the door, nods at me, and walks off. Holy shit I thought I was done for, but this only gave me more confidence to complete the task. I walk in, walk to the back of the office, I meet with the printer, look inside, and there it is. My Year 13 photography assignment, printed out in pure color paper, free of charge.

I grab said paper and head for the exit. No one, and I say absolutely no one cared at all. I think I had actually achieved a feat no other man at that school had. Free printing, for the rest of the year.

I then started using this trick, regularly. I would even sometimes strike up conversations with the teachers, and they would just assume I was working in the classroom above the office. They actually had no idea, until, the climax.

I didn't really know what to do with this newfound power. It was great getting free printing, but It's not until the Year 13 Prank rolled around that I knew exactly what to do. I didn't want to be too wasteful, because I knew this paper costs money and I am not an absolute shithead, so I theorized maybe printing 1000 pieces of blank paper or something, but I never did it. For the main Year 13 prank, some prudes were going to take all the chairs and tables out of the classrooms and dump them on the wet grass outside. To be honest, kind of funny, but man were the teachers mad at them. I wanted to participate, but again, not a shithead. My friend group at the time loved our photography teacher. She actually treated us like adults, and for the most part, let us do what we wanted in the class, provided we got our work done. So we wanted to thank her, with 300 pages of full print out portraits of all of us to remember us by.

So that night of the prank, I booted up the exposed printer web server, and dragged in 300 unique photos. The school was purposefully kept open late and some teachers were still knocking about to see what happened with the main prank, but this was our chance to raid the printer. We had to make sure the remaining PE teachers weren't going to rat us out, so I entered the office ahead of printing the 300. I then hit the button on my laptop, and it started coming. I looked like I was just inspecting them all, like some final paper that was due, but then secretly stashing them all in a folder. The whole ordeal took about 10 minutes, and I left with a stack of paper. The 2 PE teachers left, did not even bat an eye. Like I said, major cred.

I come back to the photography classroom with the goods, and I am cheered like some god. I distribute the pages and we staple them to the felt walls of the classroom and to the roof (I can't remember how we stuck them up there, but it wasn't damaging), then the following day, we surprised her with all the walls of the classroom covered with photos of us. As far as I know, these stayed up for the better part of 2 years, since she loved the prank so much.

I never told the school about the printer, so for all I know it's still open. I do wonder a lot if someone else has found it, with the same curiosity and brain as me, and if they too have used it to their advantage. This is just one of the many things at my school that was quite dramatic. Check out my other real life stories using the label.