Ever Been Accused as a Hacker?

Weird thing just happened to me today. I logged on Facebook, and one of my friends, who was a former classmate of mine from college, PMed me out of the blue, accusing me of hacking in her Facebook account. She doesn't seem quite too happy about it, and I'm not surprised she blocked me on Facebook and Twitter. Her only evidence was that Facebook told her it was hacked in a location 65 miles away from me. She drew to the conclusion that I did it since I'm from the same state where the incident originated, and I happened to know "a lot" about computers.

It was strange enough that I don't talk to her often, and I don't have any real motive to break into her account. Maybe she thought I had something against her ethnic background, but I really don't.

Have you ever lost some friends over some non-senses like this? I thought this would explained why IT nerds wearing bifocals and ink pen pocket-protectors live in solitudes since they were probably accused as well. I don't like how people stereotyped IT folks as hackers. Meh, I don't even know how to hack yet! Haha.

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Comments

About7Narwhal

Amazing isn't it? Fix something that is broken and you are a knight in shining armor. Someone clicks on a phishing link and you are the prime suspect..

Slowhand

Yup, on more than one occasion too. It seems like it's an easy knee-jerk reaction to have: I have knowledge of computers and networking, therefore I must be the reason why your computer is having issues. I suppose much of that pseudo-knowledge and absolute lack of information from the 90's still perseveres today, where the average person knows enough about their computer to depend on it but not enough about it to understand what's going on under the hood.

One incident I had was out of the blue, like yours. The other was after I'd had a disagreement with a former friend over politics, she was dead-sure that I was "hacking her system".

NetworkVeteran

Never. Then again, most have seen my clueless look when they tell me their computer's broken.

I've said "What's a firewall?", more than once with a straight face.

hiddenknight821

@NetworkVeteran: Splendid idea! I should try using my poker-face more often next time.

@Slowhand: That's the sad thing! I feel bad for people' insecurities, because of their own ignorances. Imagine our worries when we have to deal with doctors, lawyers, accountants, and auto-mechanics. Heck, I wish I know a lot more about what's under the hood of my car, but I'd just have to take a leap of faith and trust the mechanic then check with other mechanic to see whether I'm being screwed or not instead of jumping to conclusion with the first one.

ptilsen

The only time I have been accused of being a "hacker" is when it was actually (er, sort of) true. I used to remotely kill the Warcraft III executable on my roommate's computer when he was about to win a game of DotA, just for fun. We all had good laughs over that.

Otherwise, no. I've been asked, but no one has ever accused me of maliciously and secretly having broken into their computers or accounts.

kurosaki00

Nop
I dont steal FB accounts or messenger passwords.

blargoe

When I was in high school back in the mid 90's, the teacher in whatever "computer" class they offered back then always accused me when anything went wrong in the class, because I was one of the "smart" kids, and my brother was a computer geek.

Ironically, I was not very computer literate at the time and didn't know anything about computers other than using the word processing program to type my papers and play a game or two. Heh...

olaHalo

Yeah a few times.
Similar to blaming a mechanic after your cars breaks and he looked at it last.

ChooseLife

hiddenknight821 wrote: »

she blocked me on Facebook and Twitter

Wow... You can take a shot at explaining that it was not you, but if the person decides to be convinced you did it then there's not much you can do.
"You cannot wake a person pretending to be asleep"

ChooseLife

NetworkVeteran wrote: »

I've said "What's a firewall?", more than once with a straight face.

Nice! Thanks for the tip

lsud00d

Many, many times in Counterstrike. It's not my fault I can no scope scout headshot you across the map or through walls

hoktauri

Way back in 2000 when I was in high school I installed Blood 2 & Need for Speed on the systems in my CCNA class so we could all play while he talked, got yelled at for that one and called a hacker but there was no software restrictions put in place. Also watched him type his user/pass in a few times so I could learn it and install Napster. I also got a cease & desist letter from a company in the 7th grade (96,97?) for finding and exploiting a loophole in how they awarded gift certificates for filling out surveys so that one was kinda justified.

f0rgiv3n

Hahahahha wow, thread has inspired some interesting stories to come out. The only time something like this happened to me was when I was in High School. I was in my "programming" class and had recently discovered the shutdown -r -t 0 -m X.X.X.X command. We had plenty of fun remotely shutting down classmates PCs at random times. BUT I was in class and we had a sub that day. I decided I wanted to write a batch file that was self-calling that would start a shutdown (thus popping up the window) and canceling the shutdown immediately then calling itself to start again. Essentially I was wondering if it would be some sort of DoS. I was sitting there with a notepad open with the word "shutdown" all over it and the sub came up behind me sneakily and said "What are you doing?" Anyways, turns out the sub told the teacher and she asked me what I was doing when she came back.... Good fun.

eansdad

I got blamed for hacking at work ... That was fun, thank god for civil service rules and Administrative Law Judges. They gave me a 31A(fired) and I had to appeal it. Judge said ... "What evidence do you have that someone hacked into the system?". They settled with me and I got my job back that day. I brought up the point about us not having an IDS, auditing and/or special permissions set for sensitive systems and an admin that knew what he was doing (he set everything wide open). I've been on the sh*t list ever since. Funniest part ... why would anyone want to hack their system for the information when they could just OPRA for it. The information concerned a union contract that had been settled 4 months prior and all details were already well known. Stupid....

Asif Dasl

f0rgiv3n wrote: »

Hahahahha wow, thread has inspired some interesting stories to come out. The only time something like this happened to me was when I was in High School. I was in my "programming" class and had recently discovered the shutdown -r -t 0 -m X.X.X.X command. We had plenty of fun remotely shutting down classmates PCs at random times. BUT I was in class and we had a sub that day. I decided I wanted to write a batch file that was self-calling that would start a shutdown (thus popping up the window) and canceling the shutdown immediately then calling itself to start again. Essentially I was wondering if it would be some sort of DoS. I was sitting there with a notepad open with the word "shutdown" all over it and the sub came up behind me sneakily and said "What are you doing?" Anyways, turns out the sub told the teacher and she asked me what I was doing when she came back.... Good fun.

I thought of this thread when I saw this... they are starting early these days!

N2IT

LSUDOOD that's classic

We used to break out the lag switch on SOCOM all the time. That was always a fun time. My friend a really strong connection so we could easily stop the flow of data and then open it back up and by then you owned several people.

Always blamed it on little sis downloading movies LOL

Jasiono

In high school I got accused by the principal. The English teacher reported that several graduation projects were deleted from her home directory and somehow my name got thrown into it.
I almost got expelled from school because of it. It really pissed me off.

I excelled in every computer course I took and that is how they treated me. The principal was literally about to sign the paperwork for my expulsion and I told him to prove it, without a doubt, that I was the one that did it. I had to tell him I have a lawyer I could call at any moment.

qwertyiop

I was a freshman in college and was setting up my computer and printer in my dorm room when I decided if I could access any of the network resources (for fun) and ended up fining a handful of unsecured shared folders and printers. I was able to connect and install a random printer and accidentally printed something to it with my name on it and was called a hacker do through that. It didnt help that my both my roommate and I were computer security students.

J_86

I once was, at my first job ever.

My first IT job was right out of high school. Actually started working there while I was still in school, I would go to school in the morning then work since I only need a few classes to graduate. Loved the job at first, it was for a very small company and I learned so much. Things went down hill when business picked up. I was expected to work 7 days a week, calls all the time at all hours of the night on my personal cell phone..just an all around bad working environment. Ended up walking out after a headed conversation with management about why I left before x,y,z wasn't done even though I had worked till 11pm the previous night.

Few weeks later started hear things from former coworkers that I became friends with outside of work that they were telling people I "hacked" into their system. Didn't really think anything of it till one day two nice men in black suits came to my door

. We talked for a few, told them my story, they went on their merry way and I never heard from them again.

Year and a half later the owner went to federal prison for some financial crimes, guess those two guys in black suits had other things to investigate.

Master Of Puppets

I get accused of hacking every day. I work in security and this is my passion. Also, it does not help that they gave me the nickname "the hacker". Not because I go around hacking stuff but because I am really into security. However, I have never maliciously broken into networks or computers, I have only messed with my friends for fun and we all get a good laugh after it. Trust me, this is certainly not a cool nickname to have - yes, I am good at "security stuff" but my interests are purely white hat. Whenever someone forgets their Facebook password, I get a call - "This is not funny, what is my password?".

And when the university network went down when we were about to have a calculus exam, guess what happened? - there was this guy in the Networking program with an interesting nickname. Everyone started blaming me. First of all, why would anyone bring down the network when our exam is on paper

Not to mention I, of all people, had no reason to **** - did it in 40 minutes and got an A. Things like that really piss me off.

Hypntick

Much like most people in here, high school. I was in drafting class and we had a sub that week so I was screwing around on one of the workstations and wrote a little qbasic program that just started spitting out garbage to the screen. Hit escape and it closed. Yeah the sub lost it, and I had to deal with the assistant principal, got in-school suspension for that actually.

Ironically the same assistant principal later on in the year asked for my help removing a virus from the physics teacher's (his girlfriend) office system. Yeah do not miss that guy at all.

Tackle

Hmm...lets see. Most happened 5+ years ago. I've been a good boy since for the most part.

Used to play checkers on yahoo. Setup a program called Ez-Macro to record mouse clicks and speed it up. I would play timed games and if I had 1 checker left I'd go to the edge and turn on the macro. I would get 5-10 moves with the clock at 0 seconds. People never liked that.

Had sent friends a fake login screen for AOL instant messenger that recorded their login. Still get laughs about that.

Have been banned from CS:S for using wall hacks, aim bots, speed...etc. I was really good without them though.

Had setup a keylogger on a pc at home so I could get my sisters password cause she bugged the crap out of me and I could get her back once I had it.

Recently I was connected to a female friends laptop through logmein because she was having PC problems. While I was running a scan I left the screen up. Soon her BF hops on and starts looking at naughty stuff. I had a good time with that at first (moving the mouse, clicking on raunchy items). He finally got the jist when I started the webcam app.

Good times.