Hacking is in the Blood

by Ninja_of_Comp

When I was about 15, still in high school, we used to "collect" padlocks.

Why?  Well, my dad owned a liquor store and he had a drawer with about 50 keys.  Those keys were from old padlocks he used to own and he'd change them once in a while because the locks got rusted and wouldn't work anymore.

Anyway, I asked my dad if I could have them to play "janitor" and he said yes.  There were keys for all types of locks: Master, Yale, Bell, to name a few.

Well, my brother and I split the keys 50/50, put the keys on a ring, hung them on our belts, and, for us, it was cool.  We figured the more keys we had, the more "mature" we looked (pretty stupid, now that I think of it).  We then hooked up with two friends of ours who also had around ten keys lying around which they immediately brought to school.

Well, we got curious and tried the keys on the padlocks that were on students' lockers - not to "collect" the contents of the locker, but to "collect" the padlock.

We would first verify which key fit into the lock we were trying to open.  We then stuck the key all the way in and tried to turn it left or right.  If nothing happened, we would pull the key out half a bump and try again.

We would continue the process until either the lock opened, or we tried the next key.  If it opened, we would "collect" the lock and leave.  We would then try to open the lock again to see if our process was repeatable.

If we could, we marked the key where the lock worked, and kept the lock as a trophy.  If we couldn't, we threw the lock away.

We would do this every day because we figured, "What's the worst that could happen, we get caught 'trying' to open a lock with the wrong key, and that's it," which actually happened a couple of times.

We also tried combination locks with no positive results.  Those were harder to crack.

There was one lock I remember as if it was today.

It was a magnetic lock.  This lock supposedly only opened with a bar shaped magnet the user would just press to the side of the padlock and, presto, the lock was opened.

I figured that there had to be some way to open the lock with something as simple as a belt buckle.  So I took off my belt, passed the buckle on the side of the lock, and, sure enough, it opened!  This time I closed the lock without "collecting" it to try it once more then and there, but I got caught by the owner.

He told me in a very cocky way that there was "noooo way" I could open that lock without the key he had.  He opened the lock, took a book, closed the padlock, and left.

Needless to say, that was a challenge for me, so I tried it again, opened the lock, and this time I left with my "trophy."

What I am getting at is that a hacker is someone who thinks outside the box, looks for different ways to solve a problem, and never backs away from a challenge until it is solved.