If you go to school or went to school, you probably have been called hacker(in a bad way), and if anything goes wrong, they look at you.
It happens all the time, if someones computer doesn't shutdown, they get error,
wireless doesn't work, get virus, and list goes on.

of course they don't know we have ethics, and rules we live by.

How do you guys deal with that?

LOL... I agree with zeroflaw, and I'll offer some more.

Honestly, I didn't have that issue, and here's why...

I understand the typical world thinking, that hackers are evil, and anything wrong MUST be their fault.  One thing I've learned is to lay low.  (Meaning, not necessarily avoid public awareness of me, etc, but not to make it 'obvious')  I still let the folks running things know who I was, and even offered to let them monitor my activity, if I even thought I might be touching something that bordered on unacceptable use.  I still do, today.  The key is to make sure that the people to whom this truly matters (the school administrators, the IT staff, etc) are aware of who you are, and what you're doing, especially if you're already labeled a hacker or a problem, and you want to change that perception, in their view.

Mind you, as you read on, I'm not assuming you have or haven't done anything that I mention, just that this is how you SHOULD be doing things -

If you're working or doing security 'learning' on systems at your school, then you should have full approval from those in authority, to be doing ANYTHING on them.  These systems don't belong to you.  That being said, the authoritative folks generally wouldn't be allowing you to do anything 'risky' on public systems, unless it was specifically spelled out as some sort of classroom exercise, where they had full control, and could reimage / rebuild at will, at the conclusion of the exercise.  If it's not specifically setup for a class, etc, they'd typically set you up on lab machines, or something, on an isolated (keyword = isolated) network.  This is, again, assuming that they give you ANY permission to do ANYTHING on their machines and network, other than the normal browsing and school work.

Thus, IF odd things are occurring on machines around you in a 'production' or frequently used REAL environment, then it should be well understood by them, and handled accordingly, that you have not been doing any of the testing on said network or machines, and that your activities are not malicious or troublesome, any more than the next person's.  When I administered the network at the school district that I used to be IT Director for, I had proxies (with NO way around them,) and logged EVERYTHING that went in and out of my publicly accessible computers in the buildings.  If I saw an IP that looked off, I checked it, etc., especially for any students or staff whom I had ANY question about.  We had very clearly spelled out 'Acceptable Use policies' and it was very well known that we'd monitor what you're doing, what sites you're hitting, etc.  If you're at a level where you're bypassing these proxies (assuming they have them in place,) then you're possibly a little further ahead in your security learning then you're letting on, in your initial posts.  

The idea here is that, if you're being ethical, you MUST get approval for anything you're doing at school, and if you have that approval, and the administrators KNOW when you are doing what you're supposed to be doing, there shouldn't be any issues.  It's a trust factor.  If they don't trust you, then they won't even give you a LAB to play with, or any outside opportunity.  And if that's the case, you shouldn't use the school machines for ANY purpose related to hacking (ethical or not,) and save it for home.

If you're having issues, and being labeled a hacker (malicious or not,) then my suggestion would be to open a very clear discussion with the administrators at your school, and communicate what you will and won't do, what they'll allow you to do or not, and to make sure everything's clearly understood.  If that's in place, and you've correctly covered your backside, then I wouldn't worry about labels, and do what you're supposed / allowed to do.

HTH.

I think that is true in all aspects and not only applies to security. Great point.

I find that if anything out of the ordinary happens at work, my boss and people in my group ask/think I had a hand in it.  One person thinks I write viruses...lol!  I echo Ketchup's post 100%.

I would agree with your 'specific' statement that, "people only know what you tell them." The key word is know. But they will 'guess' at the rest. As is commonly said, "Nature abhors a vacuum." As I've been known to say in simpler terms, "In the absence of the facts, people will fill in the blanks with something. Unfortunately that something is usually not accurate and not positive."

So, although I know it was in jest, I would have to disagree with leaving them guessing. I've seen too many cases where people even got fired for this attitude. Communicate with them during the User Awareness Training, during help desk calls, during project planning... any way you can think of to let them know that it is totally ridiculous to think that IT/Security staff is to blame. Our jobs are there to keep things going, not to tear them down.

Inner voice: Deep breath, Don.
Don: Sorry. I get a little worked up.
Inner voice: That's OK. Better to do it here, then in the workplace.

Hope that helps,
Don

sometimes that doesn't work. I've explained how the firewall works more times than I can count. Until I've been blue in the face. They'll understand it for about a week, but the following week they'll turn around and ask the, site is giving me a 500 error, is the firewall blocking it? or the I can't to another server on the internal network, is the firewall blocking it?

Yes telling them is better than not telling them, but they have to want to know and remember, not just be at the training because they have to be, and forget what they were told when they stop pretending to care.

Sorry, just my rant on user training (I actually enjoy it, and am fairly good at it).

Agreed. If they know you can do something, they also come ask you to do favors (illegal) for them.

Roll my eyes and laugh it off. What's the most absurd thing you've been accused of? I was performing an IT Audit, doing a policy review at the moment, and a 100MB WAN connection went down. Guess who they suspected? It turned out their ISP accidentally disconnected the wrong circuit, and it remained down for 2-3 hours. *whoops*