Image credit – Ohio Office of the Inspector General
Prisons aren’t meant to be fun or relaxing so as you can imagine, a lot of the little luxuries in life we take for granted aren’t quite as readily available in most prisons, such as computers. However inside a medium-security prison at Ohio, it seems that the inmates were somehow resourceful enough where they managed to assemble two working computers in secret.
How they obtained the parts they needed was during an onsite computer skills and electronics recycling program. The computers were in operation for about four months, with one of them actually being hidden in the ceiling. It was only discovered after the prison’s IT department was alerted to a connected device that used a contractor’s stolen credentials that had exceeded the daily internet usage threshold.
After forensics went through the computers, it was discovered that they contained software that they used to apply for credit cards, research tax-refund fraud, search inmate records, obtain prison passes for restricted areas, and so on. These inmates even used the computer for tips on how to make drugs, explosives, and more.
According to Randall Meyer, the Ohio inspector general, “It surprised me that the inmates had the ability to not only connect these computers to the state’s network but had the ability to build these computers. They were able to travel through the institution more than 1,100 feet without being checked by security through several check points, and not a single correction’s staff member stopped them from transporting these computers into the administrative portion of the building. It’s almost as if it’s an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.”
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