Alright blades, so no more than 45 minutes ago I was threatened with arrest on the US, and if it was followed through, well I would spend the next few years of my life in jail here.... Story is as follows: Staying at a hotel on vacation, read their TOS for wifi use, says no downloading anything illegally, porn, etc.... Also any malicious attempt are frowned upon as well. So me being a comp security buff, I wanted to poke around this network while downloading movies. Oh boy was this a bad idea. At first I thought these guys didn't take their security seriously, as they had many open ports that could prove critical if exploited. I recently made a thread pondering the idea whether I should tell them about the holes. This morning I woke up fully ready to do that, but wanted to do a little more poking around just to see how serious the flaw was, and whether or not it was worth reporting. SERIOUSLY BAD IDEA #2. So I start poking around, trying to break into some open ports, and this goes on for another 20 minutes or so; This is followed by a knock on the door, I walk over expecting it to be my dad, well I was wrong. It was the mother fucking hotel manager. I was caught. So he beings the questioning, asking what I'm doing why I'm here, etc... I had no real way of explaining the music and movie downloading, so I fessed up to it. I did try to explain away the network poking around, which he wasn't too happy about. Last night they began noticing I was using HEAVY bandwidth, I had downloaded around 8gb worth of data in 24 hours, which is quite a bit at a hotel. So they began monitoring what I was doing, and when they found me running port scans and trying to break into some ports, they decided to come up to my room. Now let it be known, I was 110% going to report everything I found, every last bit of detail. I wasn't going to look at any sensitive information, just confirm that serious flaws existed. But the manager was having none of this, and threatened to call the local police on me. So he says this, and in my head I'm like, "OH FUCK! I'm going to get myself arrested in a country I have no citizenship in, on charges of hacking.... Goodbye the next few years of my life." So I try to convince him that I was doing it out of good intentions. Truth be told, it didn't seem like the manager was believing me, I really doubt he did but for some fucking lucky reason, he decided to let me off with a very SERIOUS warning: "If I ever, EVER catch you on the wifi, trying to get onto a computer here, or using our internet I will call the police the second I find out." He than walks over to the wall, and pulls out the ethernet chord, as if this will stop me. Than walks out of the room and as he is closing the door, stares me straight in the eyes as if he wants to kill me. There you have it, I was nearly arrested while on vacation in the US.
You did it wrong...I poke around my school's network all the time, but I have programs that help me. You need some programs.
Lucky break. Pro-tip: Don't assume people are ignorant/understaffed and whitehat or no, ask first, hack later ^.^
See here's the thing... Normally I would have said programs, but I had to bring my moms laptop with me because I was locked out of my regular comp, forced to Dban so I could recover, thus loosing all my data. Didn't have time to reinstall everything =/
Yea IKR, hella lucky break. If I did have my laptop with me, this whole situation would've been avoided.....
Ah, yes...The dreaded "It's not my machine!" Still, scripting a few shells out would have covered your tracks and most of those can be done within a command prompt...Libraries and all that jazz. I have been through a lot of shit, I've done even more...Still doing more, the beauty of man is that we have an amazing capability of learning, and I plan on being the next da Vinci.
Hehe XD Yea very true, oh well lesson learned I suppose The one script I did have on me was a custom SSH bruter.... Funny thing is 10 min after I started that sucker up, the door was knocked on XD
Haha I wouldn't bother asking that Tis be a public forum, and I think what he's talking about has no place on a public forum
[quote name='"dawnofwar"'] LOL you silly bastard XD Unfortunately the note wouldn't have helped me out in this situation....[/quote] Touché
tis a long road getting to know oneself let alone another being... and that is why we don't poke around in shit that we shouldn't i lied that's all i do
I don't think you really had much to worry about unless you actually breached their security. Poking around networks and playing with ports isn't illegal. Even if you break in, they have to prove that you criminal intent for any criminal charges to hold any water, which they couldn't do. Ethical hacking isn't illegal and some companies will even give you a job if you find an exploit in their network.
I was also downloading music and movies which is illegal under any circumstances, and it specifically says to not do anything like that. Port scanning isn't neccesarilly illegal, but I also engaged in some packet sniffing LOL And that is illegal.
Oh lol I missed the fact that the movies and music were pirated. Even then, though, is that criminal, like is it considered theft or is it a matter the MPAA/copyright owners would have to take up civilly? The agreement to use their network in a certain way is a civil, not criminal matter, so that wouldn't involve the cops or jail. What about packet sniffing is illegal? Just when you do it on other people's networks? We used packet sniffers all the time in networking school.