[sbilstein]

As a kid I ate this stuff up. In the eighth grade, I defaced my middle school website.

The IT person easily figured out it was me and then tricked me into thinking I would be expelled within days. She pulled me out of class, told me such in the hallway, let me return to class where I held in tears until the end of the day.

Nothing happened and the school year ended a few weeks later. Towards the end of the summer I realized it had been a bluff and I wouldn’t be punished. Took me a few years later to realize how much of a favor that all was! The county school of conduct clearly said cybercrime was punishable by expulsion so she could have absolutely put me in some kind of hell. The fear set me straight hah.

[busyant]

> The IT person easily figured out it was me and then tricked me into thinking I would be expelled within days.

Similar. I wrote a program to emulate a the logon text on a PDP-11 terminal in high-school in the mid-80s and steal a bunch of student passwords. Didn't do anything with them. They were like "trophies."

Nevertheless, the computer teacher found out and had mercy on me. He gave me a project to work on to help him compile stats on a student survey. He was a nice guy.

edit for clarity.

[neotek]

I did the same thing, only my program pretended to be a DOS-based Novell Netware login screen.

It was just a simple QBASIC program (that's all that was available on the Computer Room machines) running under my own login, which would write usernames and passwords to a text file in my user directory. I figured that I'd harvest a few passwords until someone got frustrated enough to call for the IT admin, at which point he would try to log in and reboot the PC when it failed, apparently "fixing" the problem and erasing any evidence of my dastardly crime.

I was right, and for a few glorious days I got away with it... until one particular arsehole picked on my best friend during recess, and I used his stolen credentials to log into his account and trash his files.

Long story short, I ended up getting expelled, which by a curious confluence of events put me on an unorthodox path that completely changed my life. Funny how things turn out.

[busyant]

> until someone got frustrated enough to call for the IT admin, at which point he would try to log in and reboot the PC when it failed, apparently "fixing" the problem and erasing any evidence of my dastardly crime.

This was precisely my logic as well.

> put me on an unorthodox path that completely changed my life.

Hopefully it was a happy path!

[ntietz]

I had a similar thing happen. I distributed some malware I wrote on the shared drive and had some people run it (it was extremely basic, just locked people out of the computer with no recovery by taking advantage of how locked down they were; but people lost a lot of work). My programming teacher, who was already dealing with me being a distraction in class, went to bat for me so I didn’t get strongly punished but made me clean it off the drive continuously; other students kept putting it back, so I had to monitor for it.