This Is a Prison Laptop

Many ordinary objects could be turned into weapons or otherwise misused by people with ingenuity and nothing to lose. That's why, as we've noted in the past, there's an entire industry that produces ordinary household and office products for prison environments.

This includes computers. Zephray Wenting purchased a prison laptop named the Justice Tech Solutions Securebook 5 on eBay. The laptop is encased in a transparent plastic shell. It has no hard drive or USB port. When turned on, the laptop asks for a password. Wenting opened the case and partially disassembled the machine, but has had no luck so far hacking the password.

You can read a complete exploration on Twitter or a detailed and informed summary on Hack-A-Day.


Like others, I read the whole thread without understanding most of it. I'm trying to picture how this would be used in a prison with no hard drive and no USB port. No mention of it having bluetooth, but wifi seems like a real security problem anyway. Does it have a CD slot? It would make sense if it were connected to a central hard drive that could be monitored, but without a port it doesn't seem possible. It could be that this computer had more parts before the guy bought it (for $5), but he knows enough to figure that out if that were the case.
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That looks like a BIOS password screen. The default for the most popular, generic password is 'AMI' . Here is a link to other, default passwords. https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000451.htm This could happen if they wiped the BIOS. Once the BIOS is opened up, it will tell you how the computer boots and what can be attached.. My guess is that it used some network device and as well as storing everything on a network.
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