• (cs)

    oh lord. i think we've all worked with this guy.

    in my case, this guy was a woman and the site was porn. in her words: "I walked away from my computer and when I got back EVERYTHING WAS SLUTS."

    i didn't do the dirty work, by the way. the lady is actually quite nice, just a little clueless.

    ps: first.

    pps: this means i'm well-endowed, right?

  • John Doe (unregistered)

    Reminds me of having created a screenshot of a coworker's desktop once, and used it as his desktop. It took him a while to figure out ;)

  • Joejo (unregistered)

    should have changed his spell checker!

  • (cs) in reply to John Doe
    John Doe:
    Reminds me of having created a screenshot of a coworker's desktop once, and used it as his desktop. It took him a while to figure out ;)

    A classic example of office swashbuckling. ;]

  • Phormix (unregistered)

    I've always found ones like this to be rather amusing... of course back in the day they didn't have the annoying advertisement clips first:

    http://www.liquidgeneration.com/Content/liquidgeneration.swf?Content_Creative=/Content/seal_sabotage.swf

  • PseudoNoise (unregistered)

    I've been caught. Some joker at our lab set the screen saver to a screencap of the BSOD. And the screen saver "program" didn't shut off until you hit a key (moving the mouse didn't bring back the screen--I think this was win2k). I thought the computer was hosed (along w/ my test) and hit the reset button. Later I found the truth. I couldn't tell who was the bigger idiot--him or me.

  • Jack (unregistered)

    I also have a co-worker that often left his computer unlocked. We used to change his MSN Messenger personal message. His last name being Berry, we would change his message to Brokeback Berry.

    Once he found out who was chaging his MSN settings, he threatened to take the issue to senior management. He also became much better at remembering to lock his system.

  • (cs)

    Even better, if your network server runs iptables to manage the LAN:

    /sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -s [CLIENT_IP] -p tcp -j DNAT --to-destination 64.111.96.38

    Requires no unlocked systems (just knowing the client IP) and redirects all their web surfing to kittenwar.com. All of it.

  • restarter (unregistered)

    Reminds me of something a group of us did while working at a large company a long time ago. There was this consultant who I'll call "Roger", who prided himself as an expert on everything IT, and was quite arrogant about it. Roger also had a difficult time remembering to lock his computer, so one day we wrote a script that when executed, would restart his machine without prompting or anything. This script was put in a shared folder so we all could run it remotely. So whenever someone got upset at Roger, revenge was a simple double-click away.

    CAPTCHA: pointer

  • Will Perdikakis (unregistered)

    Adding yourself as a "Delegate" in MS Outlook then adding phony meetings and deleting legitimate ones is always good too.

    I once unplugged a co-workers mouse and put an error message as a wallpaper. The co-worker came back to her desk, saw the message and tried to move the mouse, not moving, she thought she locked up and restarted her computer 3 times before calling IT.

    I went home early that day, but luckily the "problem" was still there when I returned the next day. So I decided to play hero and fix the computer! Win-Win.

  • seejay (unregistered) in reply to restarter
    restarter:
    This script was put in a shared folder so we all could run it remotely. So whenever someone got upset at Roger, revenge was a simple double-click away.

    That's just beautiful. Damn beautiful!

    Captcha: darwin (Wish it would catch up with idiots like that!)

  • (cs)

    We had an escalating war of sending emails out from unlocked PCs. People would always find themselves volunteering to bring donuts to the next staff meeting (sent to our entire team including the manager). Sometimes it would be an unsuspecting email to "Meet me in the handicap bathroom at 2:30 ;)". I took a screenshot of my desktop and set it up to look like I left my PC unlocked and tricked a few people.

    It was actually fun since no one got real pissy or malicious about it.

  • Hee (unregistered)
  • Jimmy (unregistered)

    When I worked in a Unix shop, we changed one guy's emacs alias so that it tee'd stdout to /dev/audio. Kinda sounds like a modem. He had no idea what was wrong with his computer.

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to Hee
    Hee:
    Check this <removed>

    NO, DO NOT.

    captcha: pointer I removed the pointer, yes.

  • Keith (unregistered) in reply to John Doe

    With a few "suspect" folders in the middle of it, of course. ;)

  • ObiWayneKenobi (unregistered)

    The REAL WTF is that people are immature enough to pull something like this. Locking your computer should not be mandatory, people!

    CAPTCHA: ninjas. Which is what I would send after these immature, juvenile douchebags were I their manager.

  • David Hasselhoff (unregistered)

    Here at work, We change the desktop background with an image of David Hasselhoff on unlocked PC.

    And actualy, I've heard of this pratice (Hasselhoffing someone) in many companies.

  • Billy Bob Jamie Joe Hickboy (unregistered)

    We used to have a problem with people locking their computers so we'd send out bogus emails to everyone on the team from their computer.

    One of my favorites was sent from our male architect's system... "I like to wear pink underwear and prance around the office after hours." Funniest thing about this was it was inadvertantly sent to the customer.

    captcha wtf is up with "onomatopoeia" being my captcha test. My fingers went numb typing that out correctly.

  • Just This Guy, You Know? (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    The REAL WTF is that people are immature enough to pull something like this. Locking your computer should not be mandatory, people!

    If you work in a field that is at all related to health care, HIPAA says that, in fact, locking your computer is mandatory.

  • (cs)

    A long time again, when I was an intern and MS Agents were new, we had a really annoying coworker (intern) that would manage to interrupt every story to tell you how he had done something better / cooler / etc. He also couldn't quite manage to go an hour without mentioning how much he hated NT and OS/2 was so much better.

    So, I wrote a little MS agent that flew around the screen, taunting him and making fun of OS/2. I then went to my friends in the desktop support department and we remotely pushed the agent out to his pc.

    good times.

  • Not You (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    The REAL WTF is that people are immature enough to pull something like this. Locking your computer should not be mandatory, people!

    That depends on where you work. A lot of the stuff that we deal with is sensitive or classified. Locking your workstation is mandatory.

    One of our favorite things to do when an office mate does occasionally forget to lock their computer is to switch the functions of the right and left mouse buttons.

  • KungFu (unregistered)

    We did this to a guy but changed his screen saver so that after 5 minutes of idle time, a blue-screen-o-death would come up. Of course after rebooting, things would be fine till he went away a few minutes. He finally found out it was us after the sys admins made several trips to his office and we couldn't stop snickering.

  • seejay (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    The REAL WTF is that people are immature enough to pull something like this. Locking your computer should not be mandatory, people!

    And you obviously do not work in an environment with sensitive information.

    Audit services would have my ass if they came by and found me not at my desk and my computer unlocked. I'm sure a client would too if their personal information was read and used by a wandering passerby who stopped to read what was on my unprotected screen while I'm off taking a pee.

    Might want to avoid generalizations... they make you look rather silly.

    captcha: it's better than yours

  • Dan (unregistered)

    The official Microsoft blue screen of death screen saver is the best thing to leave on someone's unlocked computer. It even simulates restarts every few seconds, alas, without a BIOS boot screen.

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    The REAL WTF is that people are immature enough to pull something like this. Locking your computer should not be mandatory, people!

    CAPTCHA: ninjas. Which is what I would send after these immature, juvenile douchebags were I their manager.

    My coworkers would use my acconut to send some unflattering emails to my manager if they found it unlocked. My manager would send emails to the group from my account if he found it unlocked. The security team would seriously reprimand me, up to the point of dismissal, if they found my computer unlocked.

    Every place I've worked, it's a serious breech of the corporate security policy. Maybe you just don't work on important enough information?

  • (cs) in reply to Jimmy
    Jimmy:
    When I worked in a Unix shop, we changed one guy's emacs alias so that it tee'd stdout to /dev/audio. Kinda sounds like a modem. He had no idea what was wrong with his computer.

    That's fucking awesome. Suns?

  • (cs)

    Pranking can be dangerous. A prankster liked to put clear sticky tape over the microphone of my phone which, when you answer, the other person can't hear you. 3 or 4 phone calls going "HELLO HELLO CAN YOU HEAR ME" and I eventually figured it out. So, while he's gone, I go to his desk and simply unplug his keyboard, slinging the plug end in plain sight on his desk. Not too obvious, but not subtle either. He nearly calls IT repair to get the thing fixed, and eventually comes over all huffy about my sabotaging his machine and how we'd both be in hotwater had he completed the call. I simply said "maybe these pranks aren't such a good idea then." Then we rode off into the sunset, never to prank in the office again.

  • Teflon (unregistered)

    I'm still a huge fan of unplugging keyboard and plugging your own in and taunting the person opposite with "I've hacked your computer" etc in notepad... simple but fun.

  • Otto (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    The REAL WTF is that people are immature enough to pull something like this. Locking your computer should not be mandatory, people!

    CAPTCHA: ninjas. Which is what I would send after these immature, juvenile douchebags were I their manager.

    Maybe it shouldn't be mandatory, but do you really want physical access to the building to be equivalent to network access to everything that users who are away from their desks have permission for? It's all about layers of security, and locking workstations helps immensely. It's better that these workers find out from harmless pranks than from losing a hundred thousand customer records to some criminal.

  • Malevolent Hedgehog (unregistered) in reply to Not You

    Even better to do it remotely by changing the appropriate registry key

    Captcha: Doom - how appropriate

  • (cs)

    of course I forgot to mention the time I modified a friends .login so it would OCCASIONALLY play "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" (his name was Dave, making it so apropos) and then reboot. he knew it was me but didn't know how to fix it. occasionally it'd take him 3 times to get logged in.

  • Sal (unregistered) in reply to Kerin

    Some of things we did at various times to the project manager at my last company who never remembered to lock his screen:

    • set his background to pink (this was done many, many times, and then we started escalating)

    • changed his Display preferences graphic card options for display rotated 180 degrees

    • configured his mouse to have the left/right buttons reversed

    • Changed his language settings to Japanese

    • Changed his keyboard mapping to Dvorak (this turned out to be a bad idea... he tried to recover by logging out, then couldn't log back in and locked his account from bad password attempts... had to waste the poor IT guy's time fixing it)

    • Set his "active desktop" to a Fabio fan site (his nickname was Fabio)

    • On the conference room PC connected to the big projector, set his active desktop to seizurerobots.com. I wish had been in that next meeting... (sigh, it has ads now)

  • (cs)

    I'm starting to feel a bit pranked by how the 'free sticker' thing is always coming back saying they're out of stickers.

  • Adam Z (unregistered)

    We had written a small app that would randomly move the mouse around the screen. It didn't show on the process list, so the only way to kill it was keystroke combination...

    One guy had it on his machine for a month before we removed it.

    captcha: poindexter (I have worn those glasses before!)

  • (cs) in reply to David Hasselhoff

    Not an unlocked PC, but similar.

    We had a colleague who was not popular (and thought he knew everything about computers - he didn't)

    We used a multi-user system similar to Dec PDPs with loads of dumb terminals linked via RS232.

    We changed this guy's login script to say the normal "Welcome <name>" message, followed by various junk characters (like a serial link at the wrong baud rate) then some beeps and a clear screen.

    Then up came:

    System Diagnostics... Testing RAM

    It then went through a fake RAM test, fake I/O port tests etc.

    Then it got to:

    Testing Hard Drive... Error Hard Drive not empty, Formatting 0%

    then 1%, 2% etc.

    He got more and more flustered until he suddenly realised that he could see about 8 other people all working on the same system and all still working.

    It was fun though!

  • (cs) in reply to webhamster
    webhamster:
    Even better, if your network server runs iptables to manage the LAN:

    /sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -s [CLIENT_IP] -p tcp -j DNAT --to-destination 64.111.96.38

    Requires no unlocked systems (just knowing the client IP) and redirects all their web surfing to kittenwar.com. All of it.

    Hey, isn't that rule from that article "Upside-Down-ternet???

    I'd prefer the mogrify trick explained there. All images end up flipped over.

  • el jaybird (unregistered)

    Must.. hit... sticker... form.... site.. hammered!

    Dang, out of stickers in just 6 minutes?!

    Yeah, I'm guilty of performing a number of these types of pranks too. Let's see..

    • Swap keyboard cables on two adjacent machines (in a school lab), watch the fun.
    • I have installed a BSOD screensaver on a coworker's machine (long before Microsoft went and released an officially sanctioned one.. if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, eh Bill?). In the qual lab. This turned out to be not so wise.
    • At school when someone left themselves logged in and left, they would find strange emails written to themselves if I happened to be in the same room.

    And one not so much a prank, but fun anyway. A new coworker had just joined the company in the cube next to mine. IT was taking a while to find him a computer, though. He did have a nice whiteboard with an extra-wide marker shelf, wide enough to hold a keyboard and mouse, in fact. So I scrounged up a keyboard and mouse, drew a pretty picture of a monitor on his whiteboard, printed a screenshot of a BSOD, and taped it to his board.

    He left it there for about a week until he finally got a real computer!

    Captcha: smile. Oh, did I ever.

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    The REAL WTF is that people are immature enough to pull something like this. Locking your computer should not be mandatory, people!

    CAPTCHA: ninjas. Which is what I would send after these immature, juvenile douchebags were I their manager.

    Oh ... you should tell that to our boss. Or our manager. They're reeeal good on ass-whooping security blunders.

    Oh yes ... I work for a Security department. In a finantial institution.

    If something ugly happens, and is traced back to your IP, it's your head that's gonna roll. If it was because you left your computer unlocked ... you're in for a world of shhhhhhaving cream.

  • Nobody (unregistered)

    I never really have messed too much with locked computers, but in HS I always liked turning the contrast and brightness down to 0. By the end of the school year there was a stack of "broken" monitors in the back room of the lab.

  • (cs) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    webhamster:
    Even better, if your network server runs iptables to manage the LAN:

    /sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -s [CLIENT_IP] -p tcp -j DNAT --to-destination 64.111.96.38

    Requires no unlocked systems (just knowing the client IP) and redirects all their web surfing to kittenwar.com. All of it.

    Hey, isn't that rule from that article "Upside-Down-ternet???

    I'd prefer the mogrify trick explained there. All images end up flipped over.

    Yup. And it works great! I have to admit I never even thought of doing that until I saw it there. So much fun. One of the sales guys has learned not to cross IT anymore...

  • Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy (unregistered)

    Actually I think that screwing with other people computers is offensive. If I was in place of this guy and ever found out who was doing this (mind you that I never lock my workstation in the office) I would report him to security as a saboteur and have him fired. I would probably get a reprimand for being negligent (forgetting to lock my station), but hopeful I would never see that particular coworker again.

  • (cs) in reply to Phormix
    Phormix:
    I've always found ones like this to be rather amusing... of course back in the day they didn't have the annoying advertisement clips first:

    http://www.liquidgeneration.com/Content/liquidgeneration.swf?Content_Creative=/Content/seal_sabotage.swf

    In retrospect, you don't have to be THAT much of a hacker to figure out how to bypass the advertisement, though ;)

    http://www.liquidgeneration.com/Content/seal_sabotage.swf

  • (cs) in reply to Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy
    Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy:
    Actually I think that screwing with other people computers is offensive. If I was in place of this guy and ever found out who was doing this (mind you that I never lock my workstation in the office) I would report him to security as a saboteur and have him fired. I would probably get a reprimand for being negligent (forgetting to lock my station), but hopeful I would never see that particular coworker again.

    And sometimes it's all in good fun. Unless you work in a place where everyone has a stick up their WTF. As long as it's not malicious and everyone knows when to stop, this stuff is great for blowing off some steam sometimes.

  • (cs) in reply to Will Perdikakis

    I left my PC unlocked one day and a coworker replied to some of my email with a response something like the following: "Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, but I think I'm still drunk from last night...". I don't leave it unlocked anymore.

  • Dazed (unregistered) in reply to Otto
    Otto:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    The REAL WTF is that people are immature enough to pull something like this. Locking your computer should not be mandatory, people!

    Maybe it shouldn't be mandatory, but do you really want physical access to the building to be equivalent to network access to everything that users who are away from their desks have permission for? It's all about layers of security, and locking workstations helps immensely. It's better that these workers find out from harmless pranks than from losing a hundred thousand customer records to some criminal.

    If I'm sharing a room with a couple of other people, they're going to notice if someone else starts mucking around with my workstation, aren't they? And the automatic lock comes in after five minutes.

    It seems quite ridiculous (unless one is doing something which is very sensitive) to have to lock ones workstation while one fetches a coffee. In 25 years I have never suffered from this sort of immature behaviour, and have never heard of a colleague who has either. Is this American culture or something?

  • verisimilidude (unregistered) in reply to Dan

    I tried to add this and the enterprise's McAfee software immediately deleted it.

  • verisimilidude (unregistered) in reply to verisimilidude
    verisimilidude:
    I tried to add this and the enterprise's McAfee software immediately deleted it.
    This was in reference to the BlueScreenOfDeath screensaver.
  • ricecake (unregistered)

    At Georgia Tech, when someone would leave their public computer unlocked, we would baggy pants them. Unfortunately, the Jargon File entry doesn't have the etymology of the term. I vaguely recall that the first baggy pantsing was done on a person who vehemently disliked baggy pants (back when the fad was popular), hence the post talked about how much he loved baggy pants and wore them all the time.

  • JK (unregistered) 
    echo alias ls=\'ls ../\' >> .bashrc

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