Ohio prison inmates 'built computers and hid them in ceiling'

The discovery

It has been reported that two inmates at Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio built functioning PCs from machines they were meant to dismantle for recycling — and allegedly hid them on plywood boards in the ceiling of a training room. The rigs were found after IT staff noticed unusual internet activity on a contractor's account on 3 July 2015; the account wasn't even scheduled to be used that day. Curious staff followed a network cable into the ceiling, removed tiles, and — surprise — two PCs staring back. How do you miss that? Apparently, for a while they did.

What investigators found

Forensic checks turned up more than a clever hardware hack. The drives contained pornography, articles about making drugs and explosives, credit-card data and records of passes issued to inmates so they could access different parts of the prison. One inmate later told investigators he had cannibalised parts from recycling-program PCs, plugged into an internet device and, in his words, "And then... bam, I'm on the network." It has been reported that he and his accomplice spent hours trying to bypass the prison's proxy once online.

The fallout

An Inspector General's report on the incident has been forwarded to the Ohio Ethics Commission and local officials, and it has been reported that one IT employee was found to have breached inventory and crime-scene protection policies. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said it would review safeguards while trying to keep rehabilitative programmes intact — a tricky tightrope. Not exactly the win-win the recycling scheme intended; the episode raises a blunt question: how do you give inmates useful skills without handing them the keys to the kingdom?

Sources: bbc.com, Hacker News