Ohio Prison Inmates Secretly Built PC and Hid It In Ceiling

The Ohio Inspector General’s Office has recently published a report that reveals an incident in 2015 inside Marion Correctional Facility involving prison inmates that assembled their own PC and and also managed to connect it to the prison network. The prison inmates are part of a program that involves dismantling computers for recycling so they were able to put aside pieces of hardware one at a time and smuggle it into an unmanned area in the correctional facility where they then were able to assemble it into a working system.

Not only were the prison inmates knowledgeable about computer hardware, they also were able to access the prison network system with spoofed contractor’s credentials. Prison IT staff first noticed unusual activity when one IT support contractor’s account surpassed bandwidth privileges even on the days that he was not on site. This contractor, Carl Brady then explains in the report how he found the computer hidden in the ceiling:

“I had been told there was a PC on our network that was being used to try and hack through the proxy servers. They narrowed the search area down to the switch in P3 and the PC was connected to port 16. I was able to follow the cable from the switch to a closet in the small training room. When I removed the ceiling tiles I found two PCs hidden in the ceiling on 2 pieces of plywood.“

Relaxed supervision has been blamed for the incident, as some items are harder to smuggle out than others such as motherboards, power supplies, and monitors. Can it run Crysis? Probably not, but the computer was used by the inmates to steal the identity of another inmate for tax fraud as well as credit card application, creating security passes for access to restricted areas in the correctional facility and it also contained several hacking tools which can be used to attack networks.