My frosh year of college I was put in the deans office and up for expulsion. These guys showed from from the FBI...they said they were going through our schools server and looked in my account and saw some "suspicious" programming code. They claimed I brought down the eBay servers for 3 days because I launched an attack on they´re gateway system from another local JC´s computer system using my school´s computer system from my dorm room.
The code I had was some stuff I was working on for breaking alpha numeric PIN codes. Basically it just runs every possible combination of pins and when it finds one it saves it and uses the saved ones first before going through everything. The C code I had was modeled after System Administrators Tools for Analyzing Networks.
The charges were pretty serious, and I was looking at 20 years in a federal pen because of the monetary damage done.
This happened the day before spring break...so when I got home on spring break I used MS Outlook to tunnel back into my account and look at everything they were looking at. After doing a lot of reading and researched I figured out a way to prove I didn´t do it.
I proved I couldnt have done it because the eBay systems use a version of Solaris Unix that is already patched to prevent S.A.T.A.N. from working properly. I then demonstrated a program called S.A.I.N.T. and showed how saint basically did the same thing, however the older version of Solaris wasn´t impervious to it. By showing this they realized that I couldnt´ have done it with what I had....then I showed them how someone actually used the public library to jump to this huge .edu network between schools and the local JC and my school just happen to be on there.
I was basically told I was going to be watched and not to do anything stupid. Since then I gave up on improving my ability to Code and I´m just focusing on Software Engineering from a design point of view
