Kiosk Hacking

RaggedOldManRaggedOldMan Regular
edited October 2011 in Tech & Games
Is anyone here interested in the act of hacking kiosks? I see them everywhere from town centers to the airport, and every single one of them is running on some kind of exploitable OS - usually Windows. A lot of the time, you can literally walk up to these kiosks and pop a shell within minutes if you know what you're doing. The key to hacking a kiosk is to bypass it's restrictions and do what no general member of the public is meant to be able to do. If your machine has a keyboard, try some of the Windows hotkeys to break out of the fullscreen jail which it's tried to place you in. It's only a fullscreen application running on a (probably) Windows platform, remember? :D

Once you're out of the jail, you have access to anything on the system. You can try rebooting into an Administrator account if you find yourself stuck :thumbsup: You can pop a shell easily, or break the whole machine with a forkbomb or formatting the drive. If it's a networked kiosk, try tapping into the other machines on the network. Maybe you can see things which you're not meant to be able to see :D

The possibilities are endless.

Comments

  • SlartibartfastSlartibartfast Global Moderator -__-
    edited September 2011
    yeah, I do this at the local library all the time.
    The have a few terminals reserved for the library catalogue- It's just full screen IE6 with the hotkeys switched around and the context menu disabled. I managed to turn them into general access machines pretty quick ;)

    One good thing is that they took my idea and made it a part of their offerings. They now have 15 minute stand-up general access terminals. Now to work in their wireless....juniper networks.
  • RaggedOldManRaggedOldMan Regular
    edited September 2011
    I just realized that Trx100 wrote an article in the CMS called How to Hack a Kiosk. It's actually got a lot of hotkey combinations in there which can be used to break out of kiosk-jail so that's pretty handy :)

    What is a Juniper network?
  • SlartibartfastSlartibartfast Global Moderator -__-
    edited September 2011
    juniper networks is a company that specialises in network management and deployment. A lot of organisations outsource their complex networking tasks to them.


    They're surprisingly competent for a large organisation.
  • edited October 2011
    Glad to see you enjoyed my article. Kiosk hacking is something I really enjoy, just because it's fun to walk up to a machine which, to the public's eye, is nothing more than "a kiosk". We all know that it's a computer, running an operating system though :D The look on people's faces when you pwn a kiosk is priceless.

    This thread just gave me an awesome idea.
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