It's always that kid. I did something similar in high school with luckily no serious repercussions but yup it was another kid who ratted me out. I could have changed my grades and stuff but luckily I was pretty content. The network admin who I really looked up to and asked lots of technical questions vouched for me. I think the fact that I only played around with the admin account for fun and never touched anything else helped my case.
The concerned kind. Refusing to keep their mouth shut when others exploit the system.
This is a problem, here GP is a hero, a hacker, a free spirit. But there is no point in romanticizing such behavior.
If you find a vulnerability in a system, you disclose it to the people that should know about it.
You can do that anonymously, or you can alert people in a subtle way.
What you don't do is sit on it and brag to people what a clever person you are.
What the OP did is (in this case) irrelevant to what the asshole did. There were multiple ways he could have gone about dealing with the situation that did not involve fucking someone over, but he chose to do that instead.
I just cannot attribute something like that to altruism.
I was wondering when this one would come up.
"Snitches end up in ditches" mentality is at fault here.
You pretend that someone cracking everyone's password is not a problem that the organization should address or even know about.
We should not turn our gaze away. "This is not my problem" is simply not a correct response. Snowden knew that, and yet, some people call him a snitch and a traitor.
Perhaps the discretionary thing to do in the case where the perpetrator is relatively whitehat is to mention to IT that "it appears common knowledge that all admin passwords are compromised" without exposing their identity.
