[thomasfedb]

A friend and I managed to gain superuser access to my school's systems (including remote screen access to every teacher's laptop) when I was in secondary school.

After a little playing around we handed the duty technician a post-it note with the superuser password on it and told them we would explain how we found it if they wanted.

I was summoned to the office of the head of IT, congratulated, asked to explain how we did it, and told that we had to keep the password a secret until they had a chance to fix the issues. A week later they told us it was fixed. After I graduated my school hired me as a freelancer.

This is in Australia, but I'm unsure how well my experience generalises here.

[sandworm101]

Because your school ran its own IT. In today's north america schools this is contracted out, or at least covered by a multi-school or district team who never talk to actual children. Any kid finding a flaw is a threat to that contract or system. Administrators dont want to look foolish, or admit liability for a flawed system, so they go after the kid (Modern privacy laws make them fearful of admitting anything.) Remember too that there is a culture in NA of adults seeing teenagers as a threat. They are suspect the moment they get to school. Any deviation from a norm only confirms that perception.

[thomasfedb]

Our IT department each rotated through being the Helpdesk person who talked to kids all day. They ran our robotics club. If you were interested in mail servers, or LDAP, etc they'd invite you in to see the server room.

I suppose they felt they had a duty to teach us, just like the rest of the staff.