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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Former teen hacker has a warning for parents

My latest article for the ABC Local sites is about a former teen hacker who says he had a hobby of disabling parental monitoring and filtering software. Now a few years out of high school, he's had a change of heart and is now warning parents:
For Nick it was a game. While his parents never installed the software on his computer, his friend's parents did. It became a big after school project, a challenge for a bored kid with computer skills.

"I'd go home and I would look it up on the Internet," Nick explained. "I would try to figure out how it was vulnerable. Could it just be uninstalled, would you have to have a special file, could you modify the registry?

"I'd go back the next day with a sheet typed up or just hand-scribbled instructions, and tell them how to do it. Sometimes it would take more than one day. Sometimes it would take two or three days, depending on how new the software was."
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I think I spotted a Bald Heretic in that story! CONTACT: Leave me a Houston or Texas media news tip | COMMENT: Click to leave your thoughts on this post here