• the HairOfMy ChinnyChinChin (unregistered)

    These pranks are very funny but what happens if when you go to work on their computer, someone catches you before you're finished? If you finish without anyone seeing and you've done no real harm then you might not be considered a crook. But if you're caught before you're finished then how does anyone know that you're not just a crook using a prank as a cover story? It seems to me that in an environment where security is serious, that just sitting down at a computer that has been accidentally left unlocked would be a firing offense, whether the management has a sense of humor or not.

  • sol (unregistered)

    Ok, this is a prank: I came in 2hrs early to complete a project ahead of scheduale. On the way I stopped and bought 3 rolls of plastic film/wrap. I then wrapped the computer of the guy (my direct supervisor) completely in the film. He came in at 8 still groogy and without a word just removed the film and got a cup of joe. He looked at me smiled and went to work.

    The key aspects being I came in early, to complete a task ahead of time and had time to do this, and he although groggy was not the type to let this bother him.

    If his computer had been unlocked I would have locked it before wrapping it in film.... one is a prank one is being a dick... being a dick means you could have helped me but you felt I needed an object lesson in what a dick YOU are...

    that is the WTF not the unlocked PC that the coworkers are sucj dicks they can't be called co-workers

  • Matt (unregistered)

    I used to work at the computer lab in college and we did all the standard hacks when our coworkers walked away (we never tortured the patrons like this.) However my favorite was to turn all the text of whatever paper they happened to be writing white. It only works once, but I don't remember a single person being to figure out what happened without me fixing it. And giggling in their face.

  • (cs)

    The reason for locking a desktop in a secure environment should be self evident. I can however, think of reasons to secure your desktop even the most insecure environment - such as a college lab.

    A very large public higher education system that I happen to be associated with had the Secret Service show up one day shortly after 9-11, looking for information on a particular desktop IP address. Being the good citizens that we are, and the agents having a somewhat persuasive demeanor about them, we conjured up a name to associate with that IP address at the particular time. Unfortunately the name was that of a student from a part of the world associated with the events of 9-11.

    Now that poor student had a problem. He had walked away from a lab computer and left it logged in has himself. While he was gone, someone used it to e-mail a rather rude message to the President. This presumably turned out to be a major event in that young students life.

    Unfortunately I don't know how the story ended. The agents tend not to share information on things like this with ordinary folks like me.

  • bob the crank (unregistered)

    This all sounds really pathetic.

    sorry you guys have such shitty jobs.

    trashing people's computers is a good way to get sent to the curb at my company... we're working together, not making fun of each other.

  • (cs) in reply to Robert
    Robert:
    bstorer:
    Back in college my roommates and I all ran Linux. One of my roommates left an ssh terminal open to his machine logged in as root on my computer. We put so many backdoors on his system. We activated the nobody account for login and gave it complete access through sudo. We setup anonymous FTP with complete access to the file system. We put a PHP file in his web directory that ran commands sent to it as root and dumped back the input.(...)

    Hmm, the personal computer is kind of... "personal", wouldn't you agree? Doing something like this is not only actually damaging his property, it is also destroying any measure of trust that may have been there. If I had roomies who would do something like this... I would move out of the dorm, and sue them for damages. Yes you read that right.

    Leaving a shell open is a mistake, but more or less destroying the installation as a response has nothing to do with humor. This is not a prank, but purely malicious. When someone forgets to lock his appartment do you go in, put his stuff on the sidewalk and pee on the floor? Or if it's a car, do you push it down a hill?

    Move out and sue? Boy, I bet you're great fun to be around. Leaving a shell open is a mistake, but it's a grevious one. If he had been careless enough to do that to someone who wasn't trustworthy, his data would be gone and a keylogger would have been installed. We just made sure he learned how to lock his system up tight, which he did. There is no trust lost by having some fun, provided the pranked can also take a joke. I wouldn't do this to you because you'd probably start crying and threaten to sue. Of course, I'd never choose to live with you anyway, so it's not really an issue. The installation was not destroyed. The prank was harmless, the backdoors used mostly to make his computer start playing Hootie and the Blowfish when he was listening to other music. If someone I know has a sense of humor leaves his apartment unlocked, I might go in and turn all the furniture backwards. But that's not really the comparison. The comparison is someone leaving their apartment open and putting a note on my desk saying so. I don't just go around checking doors.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to Not You

    I love popping 2 keys off of a keyboard and switching them. You would not believe how hard it is to type if you are actually looking at the keys. Even with 2 keys flipped I must look away from the keyboard to type.

  • Yogi (unregistered) in reply to bstorer

    [quote user="bstorer]Move out and sue? Boy, I bet you're great fun to be around. Leaving a shell open is a mistake, but it's a grevious one. If he had been careless enough to do that to someone who wasn't trustworthy, his data would be gone and a keylogger would have been installed. We just made sure he learned how to lock his system up tight, which he did. There is no trust lost by having some fun, provided the pranked can also take a joke. I wouldn't do this to you because you'd probably start crying and threaten to sue. Of course, I'd never choose to live with you anyway, so it's not really an issue.[/quote]So in order to teach him about security . . . you riddle his computer with security holes. Gotcha. [quote user="bstorer]The installation was not destroyed. The prank was harmless, the backdoors used mostly to make his computer start playing Hootie and the Blowfish when he was listening to other music.[/quote]Because they could only be used by you, right? No one could possibly detect them using basic port scanning tools and exploit them as well, right? [quote user="bstorer]If someone I know has a sense of humor leaves his apartment unlocked, I might go in and turn all the furniture backwards. But that's not really the comparison. The comparison is someone leaving their apartment open and putting a note on my desk saying so. I don't just go around checking doors.[/quote]No, this is opening the windows and punching a few holes in the wall.

  • dusoft (unregistered)

    Have you tried this? http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/8c52/

    People are unable to find out, they suspect electric plugs etc. making the weird sounds.

    captcha: howdy

  • Kjella (unregistered) in reply to TheRider
    TheRider:
    Not Funny?:
    OMG!:
    Boo Hoo:
    One time, where I used to work, I saw this woman's PC unlocked, so I went over (on my way to lunch) and set her Marquee screen saver to

    "I WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING!"

    Upon my return, I found out that she was crying (wailing, actually) in the women's bathroom. I felt so, so, so, so bad.

    It turns out that these were the last words from her father; he had been hit by a drunk driver the year previous or so.

    She had given HR the usual suspects. Luckily, I wasn't on the list. Until this day, I haven't told a soul.

    Phew, that was a close one.

    OMG!

    does anyone else find this the least bit funny?

    What I find most disturbing is the fact that this guy doesn't have the spine to walk up to his victim and tell her what he did and that the effect was unintentional and that he was ever so sorry.
    My thoughts exactly. Or even if he didn't, I'd go out and find a nice card, a box of chocolades and explain as much anonymously. Perhaps she had told some of her coworkers about her father's death, and to this day thinks someone intentionally did it; it was quite the coincidence. That is really beyond cruel, even if it'd have consequences coming forward.

  • BigJonsson (unregistered)

    most of us have matured past drawing dude parts on passed-out roommates.

    One of my favourite practical jokes is this (works well with KDE desktop, windows users might have to adjust):

    1 - Coworker leaves his/hers workstation unattended 2 - Take a screen capture of the entire desktop 3 - Hide all icons from desktop 4 - Hide the task bar 5 - Set desktop background picture to be the screen capture taken in step 2

  • Lars Westergren (unregistered)

    I agree with Bob the Crank. Doing it once, and then explaining to the guy, that would have been funny. Doing it twice, that to me borders on bullying. You don't know how cruel it is, or how terrible it can feel, unless you have been subjected to it yourself.

  • Jamie (unregistered) in reply to Joejo

    Or his Word auto-correct. Change their to there, which to witch, etc.

  • spawn57 (unregistered) in reply to darin

    read that again .. "light hearted", "no damage or loss". Things like changing the screen saver, uplugging the keyboard, putting tape on the mouse or sending out silly e-mails to co workers.

    don't be such a tight-ass

    Capthca: kungfu, and I'm from Hong Kong too. How appropriate.

  • slowtiger (unregistered) in reply to spawn57

    Well, doing a screenshot of a desktop seems to be quite common. But there's more potential to it.

    Years ago in the graphic department of some quite-known dotcom I made the screenshot from a workmate's desktop who was out to lunch and put it into Director, made a little application from it, and put it back on her Macintosh. When she returned, the first click of the mouse broke the menu bar in half and hung at a 15° angle from the top ... her next click started some animation of icons chasing each other into the trash and stuff like that.

    Of course she just laughed since the prank was so obvious. We worked in a big room with about 10 graphic designers, and sometimes it was just about "how much animation can you do during a lunch break?"

    The real fun was when she called fo IT for help. This guy came in while we kept straight faces, touched her Mac, saw the breaking menu bar and couldn't figure out what happened. Even when I said it was no virus or bug, he kept asking me how I did that. Using a multimedia program just wasn't on his radar, and he seemed a bit disappointed about how it was done. (Yes, this was one of the real friendly work environments.)

  • gro (unregistered)

    Do you know how many different 3rd party toolbars can Internet Explorer have? :)

    I do, those can be a pain in the ass to remove.

    Another nifty trick is to put a piece of note-it sticker in the bottom of optical mouse, it never fails.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to el jaybird

    "If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em" is BillG's MO. This is how Mark Russinovich's BlueScreen screensaver became absorbed into the Microsoft empire.

  • Steve (unregistered)

    I remember once, we had a programmer who left his computer unlocked. My friend and I went to his computer and changed turned on the hidden bit on all of his source files. When he came back and tried to find his files, he started to panic and went to get the network admin to perform a restore from backup. While he was gone (his computer still unlocked) we turned off the hidden bit. With the network admin in tow, he proceeded to list out his folder and there was all of his source code. The network admin thought he was a bit loony, and my friend and I sat there laughing. It took him about half the day before he asked us what we did.

  • (cs) in reply to Jo

    [quote user="Jo"][quote user='Wene Gerchinko"]Do you leave your front door wide open?[/quote]

    That's not really the question, is it? The question is: What do you do when you see that your neighbour left the door open?

    On this site the answer seems to be to get in the house and crap on the floor instead of closing the door.[/quote]

    In my college dorm, some people would leave their rooms unlocked when going to class. Our RA would leave a note in their room to remind them, but we had an unnofficial policy of pulling appropriate pranks on them to drive the point home.

    The most fun prank was to take everything out of their room and recreate the layout in our floor's common room. If you get a lot of people, you can clean them out pretty quickly and thoroughly. There was nothing quite like the look on their faces when they walked into the common room to see people laying in their bed, sitting on their couch, listening to ther CDs on their stereo, etc.

  • Philippe Schober (unregistered)

    At university there was one of those students (computer sience) who wondered why KDE wasn't starting. Well his quota was used up (because he logged in on Windows and that used his home directory for temporary internet files) so it wasn't able to initialize correctly.

    Another student was very happy to help him since work needed to be done. But he wasn't very comfortable with Linux so he was searching a fast way to clean up the users home directory of all that crap.

    One of the elder students (I bet he is still studying after all those years) recommended "rm -rf *" and the second student typed it and really hit enter...

    I always liked those guys who left their workstations locked while going to lunch. Most days all computers in the pool were locked this way. But since KDE and Linux are not secure at all when you can reach the computer switching the terminal and hitting CTRL-C killed KDE and returned you to the prompt with the user still logged in... Modifying the .profile file was the normal way to mark those idiots.

    (Before someone starts crying, you weren't allowed to block a computer when leaving the room for longer than some minutes (but the admins just didn't care))

  • Dr Sanchez (unregistered)

    One evening before april fools I swapped over the monitor cables on two machines. They were back to back, adding to the confusion. I thought it was inspired at the time ;)

    When I arrived the next day I was greeted by 2 bewildered people and my boss with a very angry look on her face. (My being the only person with any level of computer skill in the place outed me as the culprit it seems)

    I was made to undo my handywork (I had a big grin on my face under the desk), then I got marched into an office for a lecture.

    She was a nazi with no sense of humour, or knowlege of computers in a computer based department. So I stand by my actions!

    Captcha: Darwin...Hah! I invoke thee

  • Mr. Z. (unregistered)

    I remember back in freshman year college my roommate had a prank war with one of our suitemates. One of the pranks involved setting the homepage and the desktop background to one of the grossest beastiality pages you'd ever pray not to see. And then removing the ball from the mouse and hide it inside the ceiling lamp.

  • entrex (unregistered) in reply to TheRider

    What I find disturbing is your complete lack of humor. My respect for this site is slowly going down as I contuine reading this thread. I have never seen a bigger collection of cry babies in my life.

    To the prankers: You've given me many ideas!

    To the whinners: Go home and play WoW

  • Cato (unregistered) 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 ;)
    We used the same trick to make it appear as if Win95 applications ran on Win 3.11
  • Ash (unregistered) in reply to Robert

    I'm appalled that people would actually go in and delete files, or install keyloggers, rootkits, and things like that.

    Changing a screensaver or something harmless, fine. But nothing destructive..

    I'd be angry at any roommates or coworkers that did anything destructive to my computer, if I were to leave it unlocked. You should be able to trust the people around you. I know it's a very good habit to lock your computer when you're away from it, but dang.

  • rai (unregistered) in reply to el jaybird
    el jaybird:
    - 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.

    running BSOD while winamp is playing... hmmm...

  • Tarwn (unregistered)

    My absolute favorite is a windows XP theme called "PowerpuffGirls.theme" with a quick stopto increase the volume to the top. Nothing reminds people to lock their computers quite light a ghastly mix of pastels and choice sound bites :)

    Second is psexec with a script to swap out all the icons on the desktop with similarly named (and iconed) shortcuts pointing to various places.

  • Boring (unregistered)

    Wow -- a lot of you must have (had) really boring jobs. Where I work, people spend their lunch breaks and other free time by chatting with their colleaugues, drinking coffee, playing board games, reading in the library etc... Messing with someone's computer/work sounds rather boring and childish. Do/did you also hide their coats and other personal items, so they would "know better" the next time?

  • MistresBlue (unregistered) in reply to George Leithead

    I used to do this continously to my ex-husband when he would call me weekly to fix his computer because he had once again gotten a virus from some porn site or e-mail. I set all the IP addys to point to like Nickjr.com, disney.com, and things like that. I also charged him $75 to "fix" this problem each time. ;p Needless to say, he finally uses the virus scanning program I installed for him. Now if I could just get him to pay his child support,,,,

  • Quirk (unregistered) in reply to David Hasselhoff

    you wouldn't happen to work for a company called teleperformance... would you?

  • Phone Monkey (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!

    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.

    I work as a phone monkey, no coding at work, no internet... just customer records and the referance ssytems. There is NOTHING you can't get out of the appropriate phonebook which you can find on my computer, and in addition, to get access to the building you need to have your ID swiped. There is a security guard at the door to make sure you are yourself, and it is STILL mandatory to lock your computer! Also untill about a year ago, we (the phone monkeys) all shared a single username/password, so locking had absolutly no point. Locking has it's place, but if you have cameras covering the computers, and ids on everyone entering, locking seems overly redundant. Anyone who wants the informaation can get it and no one who shouldn't have access to the data is let into the building. The bean counters need a serious lesson in both rational and practical security and usability.

  • Nonesuch (unregistered) in reply to JK

    I had finally reached my limit with one particularly dense and annoying co-worker. I wrote a UNIX shell script that would sporadically alias his ls command to be 'ls | rev' and then remove itself. Once the boss was standing over his shoulder when he listed the files and it was all reversed. "What happened there?!" demanded el jefe, who was a very bright guy. "Oh, that just happens sometimes..." said Rob. That was his name. Rob.

    I also wrote a little program to renice all the processes owned by Rob, and make them go... real... slow.

  • zzo38 (unregistered)

    I always lock my computer (or log out) when I am away, by using the keyboard shortcuts (even when I am at home). Sometimes I even push it obsessively (in case I forget whether or not I did already), even if the monitor is off I know that keys combination locks it so I push it anyways.

  • Maxx (unregistered)

    I recently started a new job and like an idiot left my computer unlocked when I went to lunch (my last job wasn't very security focused). When I came back there was an email from me to the entire department informing them that I understand the implications of leaving my computer unlocked and would be buying everyone lunch the following week. Embarrassing, but funny. Lesson well learned.

  • 🤷 (unregistered)

    At my old job, the admin (of all people) once left his computer unlocked. But since we where not complete dicks we just opened up Notepad, wrote a message like "This is a friendly reminder to lock your computer when you leave your desk" and then locked the PC.

    The admin thanked us for locking the PC and not doing anything stupid with it. He learned his lesson. After that I never saw his PC unlocked while he was away from his desk.

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