We are impressed by prisoners in the US who built two personal computers from parts, hid them behind a plywood board in the ceiling of a closet, and then connected those computers to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's (ODRC) network to engage in cybershenanigans.
Compliment are less forthcoming from the State of Ohio's Office of the Inspector General, which published its
50-page report [PDF] into this incident yesterday, following an lengthy investigation.
The Inspector General was alerted to the issue after ODRC's IT team migrated the Marion Correctional Institution from Microsoft proxy servers to Websense. Shortly afterwards, on 3 July 2015, a Websense email alert reported to ODRC's Operation Support Centre (OSC) that a computer operating on the network had exceeded a daily internet usage threshold. Further alerts, seven regarding "hacking" and 59 regarding "proxy avoidance", reported that the user was committed to network mischief.
From there the search for the miscreant began, and once the log-in credentials used were found to be be illicit, the ODRC's IT employees attempted to find the unauthorised computer by locating the network switch it was connected into.
An incident report filed on the discovery, included in the Inspector General's, noted:
On the above date and time I was following up on information received from OSC IT department. I had been told there was a PC on our network that was being used to try and hack through the proxy servers. They narrowed the search area down to the switch in P3 and the PC was connected to port 16. I was able to follow the cable from the switch to a closet in the small training room. When I removed the ceiling tiles I found 2 PC's hidden in the ceiling on 2 pieces of plywood.
The computers were cobbled together from spare parts which prisoners had collected from Marion Correction Institution's RET3, a programme that helped to rehabilitate prisoners by getting them to break down old PCs into component parts for recycling.
