Former teen hacker has a warning for parents

(4/10/07 - abc13.com/HOUSTON) (KTRK) -- While most high school students concern themselves with the big football game or who they will take to the next dance, Steven Nick was thinking about something else most of the time.

"I disabled parental software," said Nick. "Spent a lot of time doing so with my friends."

He's talking about the programs designed to keep your children safe from Internet predators and unsuitable content online. These days, the news is filled with stories of children being abducted by a stranger they met online.

For Nick it was a game. While his parents never installed the software on his computer, his friend's parents did. It became a big after school project, a challenge for a bored kid with computer skills.

"I'd go home and I would look it up on the Internet," Nick explained. "I would try to figure out how it was vulnerable. Could it just be uninstalled, would you have to have a special file, could you modify the registry?

"I'd go back the next day with a sheet typed up or just hand-scribbled instructions, and tell them how to do it. Sometimes it would take more than one day. Sometimes it would take two or three days, depending on how new the software was."

Nick says his friends' parents never suspected a thing.

What might come as a surprise to many parents is the fact that there are many versions of Steven Nick across the country. He says there are entire online communities dedicated to hacking the parental software.

"For every lock there is a locksmith, so every time there's someone who's going to spend the time to pick this lock," Nick said. "All it needs is one person to do it and push it out on the Internet, and then one person to download it. We used to circulate things on disks or more recently, on jump drives, those little USB flash drives."

Jay Lee, a Houston IT specialist and host of computer radio show Technology Bytes (Geekradio.com), says that any search engine can show you results on how to bypass the software.

"Keep in mind that while these options may baffle and confound the parent, a determined young person could easily interpret the instructions and find their way to an un-filtered and uncensored Internet without breaking a sweat," Lee said.

Aaron Kenny, the Chief Technology Officer of parental control, Internet filtering and monitoring software Safe Eyes, says what Nick is talking about isn't an easy task.

"While it certainly isn't impossible for an extremely computer savvy teenager to work around Parental Control Software, we go to great lengths to harden Safe Eyes to circumvention," Kenny said. "Finding a way around Safe Eyes is a very difficult task for most teenagers, many who try end up breaking their computer in the process. Safe Eyes, unlike much of the parental control software on the market, stores its settings and site database on our secure servers where they can't be tampered with."

John Cheney, executive vice president of global Marketing at SurfControl who makes the leading Internet security software, CyberPatrol says they design the software with tampering in mind.

"Monitoring and filtering Internet access may not be popular with children, and they may search for ways to bypass systems put in place to protect them," Cheney said. "CyberPatrol can be setup by parents and the configuration settings are password protected, stopping children from disabling the security features. Importantly CyberPatrol has a detailed event log, allowing parents to see which sites their children visited."

These days Nick has had a change of heart. A few years out of high school, he realized that bypassing the software could actually endanger someone's life.

"It started to get to a point where I realized that what I'd done in high school no longer stood," Nick said. "It wasn't about just blocking content on the Internet, it was about keeping kids alive."

Nick has published an e-book called the Kid's Safe Book: Keeping Your Kid's Safe Online. Inside he has compiled his knowledge from being on the other side of the equation in an attempt to warn parents. His tips range from parental software all the way to social networking web sites like MySpace. Plus he adds some real life advice.

"Don't depend on the software to keep your kids safe," Nick advises. "Don't depend completely on the software to do your job for you. You have to talk to your kids."

That is a sentiment echoed by every person interviewed for this story, including the representatives of the parental software.

"Make [your children] understand if you choose to put monitoring software on&it's not about spying on them, it's not about invading their privacy, this is about protecting their lives in the best way you know how," Nick said.

- www.kidsafebook.com
- www.cyberpatrol.com
- www.safeeyes.com
- familyinternet.about.com/od/parentalsoftware
(Copyright © 2007, KTRK-TV)

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