1995 Cyber Pranks/"Crimes" That Brought Us Together ⌨️

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[@ModernRogue]

Go to buyraycon.com/rogue for 20% off sitewide, plus free shipping! Brought to you by Raycon. DISCLAIMER: We don't condone these actions. Mr. Slappy Flappy's identity might never be known. Jay and "Victor's" shenanigans are a cautionary tale for all time: lock down your devices.

[@otherrestrained4405]

Or windows 3.11 had networking.

[@RAquarii]

I remember a time when anyone who could turn a computer on could get a job as a "computer expert." At school we had one of those guys at the computer lab tech, clearly had no idea what he was doing but insisted he was an expert. We would constantly mess with the computer, moving stuff around, deleting shortcuts, nothing advanced to a hobbiest but to someone who was barely computer literate and was pretending to be an expert, each prank required dedicated effort to crack. I like to think that by the time we graduated he was an actual computer expert because we kept forcing him to figure out how to fix stuff.

[@DudeWhoSaysDeez]

Lol

[@JamieAubrey]

Reminds me of a time when I discovered how to "hack" webpages just by changing the code in inspect element ( was it still called that back in the 90s ? ) anyway I opened the schools main webpage and just changed the name of the school to my name ( great idea at the time but guess how fast I got caught lol ) and just left it there for someone to find, well the teacher that found it took a fit and thought I hacked into the schools security and they had to have an emergency meeting about getting better security They finally called me into ask how I did it and I walked over to the computer and pressed F5 and the page returned to normal and told them I just "temporary" changed it via HTML editing

[@Subaru_Natsukii]

​​@@JamieAubreythis reminds me of when I did something with inspect element in HS, had nothing to do, so was looking at what I can change, and the "top" IT person came down from the help desk area and scolded me saying "don't mess with inspect element it will change it on actual site" all i could think to say was "if you really think that the barrier to entry for your job must be anyone with a pulse lol" and got a rewarded a vacation from school the rest of the week

[@Panthror]

Pretty much the same story for me. But I was actually studying IT, and was a bit surprised the people teaching me didn't know how to fix the pranks I pulled. I actually 'secured' the computer better than they could: I set-up a password on one of the screensavers, then went on to put that .src file in the start-up map. So every time the computer would start, it would start the screensaver, which you could only shut-down with the password. And, since Windows '95 was a MS-DOS shell, to solve this you'd start the computer in DOS-mode, go to the start-up directory and delete any .src files in there, then re-start in Windows. But they couldn't figure this out. Another fun one was to put a loop in one of the start-up files called 'autoexec.bat', no need for extended knowledge of coding, all you did was open the file in wordpad, and at the end add: :end goto end save the file, and watch them lose their minds because they couldn't figure out why the computer wouldn't start, when a simple simultaneous push of crtl+esc would've solved it.

[@eken81]

Low level. But I remember classmates that hid mp3s in their personal storage folder by changing the file extension. I think the IT department got wise of this in my last year and both limited each users storage and searched for filetypes that were unusually large.

[@skulleigh5867]

In 1995 I worked tech support for the people who sent out all those CDs for 30 free days. When coworkers would walk away from their stations without locking them, oh, we would swing into action. My favorite was taking a screenshot of their desktop, setting that as the background and moving all the shortcuts & files to a subfolder, then sit back and wait for the frustration of why nothing worked.

[@MaverickBlue42]

Nice, I also did AOL UK tech support for 2 months in 2003 after my sub-contracting company pulled us off the Earthlink campaign because we're in Canada and there were new US laws coming into place to combat jobs going overseas, despite our centre having the best stats across both internal agents and contract agency agents, because you know, there's that great big ocean between Canada and the USA. Then I got shunted to Bell Canada where I simply refused to do certain parts of the job, such as making a sales pitch on every technical support call for licensed security products that would typically brick your computer more often than protect it from threats. I'm looking at "you", whoever designed Freedom Antivirus and Firewall. Somehow still got promoted and just walked away a few months later, our official manager hadn't been seen for months by that point so he'd presumably done the same....

[@Dan-Simms]

Oh yeah, that's a classic.

[@Mr-Blitz]

I did this in high school hahahahaha

[@bsparky01]

Had a boss one time that had access to all the system profiles that did that as an April Fools prank for his team. It was great seeing all these lvl 2 techs freaking out cause none of their desktop icons were working 😂

[@antivanti]

Classic prank. Later on Windows XP you could also lock the computer after putting the screenshot as background. And if they had an intel graphics chip you could flip the screenshot upside down and then use Ctrl-Alt-Down to flip the output upside down making it seem like the mouse was all wrong and the start menu coming in upside down

[@gabrielpesch5247]

When I did my first internship, I worked transcribing audio recordings of court hearings stored on a CD. I enjoyed playing pranks on my colleagues, and one day, I decided to create a script that would, at random intervals, open the CD drive, forcing them to close it and find their place in the video to continue their work. All the computers were connected to a network, and I didn't really know what I was doing, but I executed the script. As a result, all the computers in our department (about 10 of them) ended up running the script to open and close the CD drive at random moments. When we left the department for lunch, a girl was left alone dealing with some issues. When I returned from lunch, she was completely terrified. I got concerned and asked her what happened. She made me promise not to tell anyone... She said she thought the office was haunted. That's when I remembered the script. I laugh so hard when i figured out thats why she was scared

[@seanhampson4126]

In High school one of our classes always had little Ubuntu laptops for everyone to do work on. One day the teacher left to go print some stuff for the class while we were working, and I subtly snuck onto their laptop and made it so any time they booted up it would play the ""dancing Gandalf" .gif. Every class it happened for like two weeks, with the teacher getting more frustrated every day. Finally I offered to fix it for the teacher, and they accepted, and actually bumped up my grade for being helpful!

[@DoubsGaming]

respect+

[@Aaron-zu3xn]

do you guys remember the captain crunch whistles out of the cereal boxes? they had to ban them because you could match the sprint/mci/at&t land-line carrier tone and make free international calls,it tricked payphones into thinking you inserted the coin(it would send a tone when you drop a coin in the pay-phone)

[@aettic]

Some of the first phone phreaking!

[@coughcough5839]

thats insane

[@greensteve9307]

Whaaat? That was real? I always assumed that was an urban myth.

[@Aaron-zu3xn]

@@greensteve9307 yea it was real you'd blow the whistle into a handheld cassette tape recorder then play it back into the phone so it thought u put coins in

[@Aaron-zu3xn]

@@greensteve9307 you could also talk to AOL's dialup servers with them

[@AlovicGrim]

Mr. Slappy Flappy wasn't the brightest Chappy. That was quite the fun story.

[@dflosounds]

Around 8 years ago I worked as IT for a company that primarily used Mac. Part of my job was to run health checks regularly on all of the computers, which involved connecting to each machine over the local network through terminal, allowing me to run commands in the background. On a day of boredom, I learned about the "say" command on macOs, which uses text-to-speech to make the computer say anything you want. Let's just say that a lot of people got a little spooked when their computers suddenly started talking to them and making snarky comments about the work they were doing.

[@AedarinOfMinecraft]

While not nearly as nefarious, I do have a story of modifying a shared "public" computer. in the late 90's I was a homeschooled high school student dual-enrolled at the local 2-year college. I didn't have my driver license yet, so I would get dropped off and picked up. This meant I could have a couple-hour gap between classes to burn which I often spent at the campus library where they had some Internet-connected Windows NT machines. I decided that a tiled image of the school's initials would look way better than the flat blue-green background, so I opened up MS Paint, made the image, saved it on the machine, opened the desktop settings, and updated the background. It stayed that way for about a week before someone noticed and got it reset, but of course I updated it again. After the second time it was reset they decided to lock down the desktop settings. But, interestingly enough, MS Paint had a menu option to make the current image the background. Sure enough, that completely bypassed the "can't modify desktop settings" security. I don't remember how long I kept that up, but the MS Paint trick never failed to update the background whenever I tried.

[@shinynickel05]

The first thing I thought of was the time in high school around 2000 when someone went around stealing the roller balls out of the mice in the computer lab repeatedly. We joking referred to it as the 'neutering epidemic'. The person was never caught. As far as my own misdeeds: When we were junior high age, my brother and his online gaming friends made themselves a little private forum for chatting and hanging out. My brother had a habit of leaving it up on the family computer and running off to eat or do homework. I discovered that all the forum thread titles were editable, by anyone, long after creation, so I went in and creatively worked the word 'balls' into every forum thread title from the past month or so, knowing they'd initially blame my brother and he'd get so much shit for it. I like to think both my brother and the friend of his who set up the forums learned valuable lessons from that incident. They're all still super close friends, btw. The dude who created that forum was the best man at my brother's recent wedding.

[@shanemjn]

When I was at school myself and a couple friends worked out, if we went a certain amount of folders deep, we could keep pressing back and eventually get to the main network folder every students individual folders were in. There was one kid who was horrendous, stabbing people with pencils, ripping up people's work, just being a bully. In wood working one day, he took a pair of shears and cut a massive amount of a friend's hair off, so we deleted EVERYTHING from his network folder. He lost all of his work and because all of the teachers knew what kind of student he was, they all just assumed he never did any of the work. During a maths class, he tried to explain to the teacher that his work was gone, I distinctly remember the teacher say "it's wouldn't have deleted itself would it?"

[@CanadianOutlaw]

So I worked at an office and one agent would always leave their computer unlocked when they went to run the money over to the bank at the end of the day. I decided one day while they were gone to press ctrl, alt, and one of the arrow keys to flip the screen then locked their computer. The reason I got found out . . . I was the only one in the office tech savvy enough to know how to do that. Thankfully the agent found it hilarious and called it "the best office prank anyone has pulled on them".

[@DoubsGaming]

Simple and sweet.

[@KevinBarberPhoto]

Windows 98 had a bug where you could ping a computer with a huge packet size and it would crash the computer. In my college dorm there were a couple of computers just outside my room and I would send the “ping of death” to one of them while people were up late working on papers, or access them through VNC and move the mouse around while they were working. I can still hear them saying “WTF?”! Another favorite of mine was to write a cron job that emailed my friend the time every 2 minutes.

[@cladxylophone0524]

For april fools this year, I wrote a batch file that just brought you to youtube and rickrolled you. I moved his steam shortcut to a folder in his documents called april fools with a .txt and then went into the properties of the shortcut to get the file path to the icon image then pasted that into the properties for the batch file and renamed it to steam. It had 2 lines of code and after the video gets brought up it opened up the .txt that tells him how to undo the prank. I still have a USB with everything on it including a read me in case I want to either give my friends a copy or I forget how to use it.

[@DoubsGaming]

May I get access to said prank?

[@pyrotechniclaw9262]

I was in middle-high school in the late aughts, and we still had computer labs with fast internet as a new thing. We were allowed to be in the labs before or after school for "schoolwork," but this was also the golden era of flash games so an arms race of our technology teacher trying to prevent gaming vs. the rest of us trying to find ways around firewalls and filters. I and a handful of friends discovered that they had put restrictions on all student accounts, but not on the teacher's accounts, and more importantly not on the accounts of the Network printers they had setup. they also hadn't password protected the accounts of the printers. So we would log on as printer-003 etc. and play OG Bloons and Runescape to our hearts content.

[@rockaholictom]

In High School, we were locked out of the flash game sites on the library computers. So a classmate locked the school out of their own network because the routers for the school Wi-Fi were all admin admin. We had full network access on our PSP’s and IPod Touches but none of the faculty could get it for a week.

[@kyusha5676]

did something similar in middle school and uploaded Halo 3 and minecraft onto all the library computers

[@ZacharyErbaugh]

Legit choked up a bit for the Jay stories ❤

[@ModernRogue]

same. Tried to keep it light. -BB

[@ViviSectia]

In high school, the IT department had made no effort to secure anything. Me and a friend stumbled onto the fact that we had almost complete access to the administrative offices files from every computer on the network. We found all the personal information for all the kids in the districts along with their ID card photos. We both showed other friends and before long, everyone in the school had all that information. It was mostly used for prank calls and photoshopping friends ID card photos before the school implemented basic security. We also had access to the disciplinary records which were funny to read through but they were at least smart enough to not put too much personal information in them. Apparently there were a lot of kids getting in trouble for pantsing while I was there.

[@davidhealdjr.513]

I worked in an IT department where one of our fellow IT techs was extremely unqualified. One day I put a restart command in this person's start-up folder. So, if they logged in, the computer would automatically reboot, but anyone else could log in normally. I meant to be there when they came in, but I was sick. I'm told they spent the entire shift chasing down this problem, and it was the most productive shift the department had had since once the person had started. When my boss found out he called me into the office. Asks, "Did you do this?" I said "Yes sir." He responds "That was really funny, but don't do it again." He was stifling a laugh.

[@Robynhoodlum]

Reminds me of middle school where one kid would randomly shutdown other people’s computers in the lab while we were supposed to be working. I was about ready to strangle him bc he kept making me lose my place and I’d have to start all over again.

[@matthewfrederickson962]

Not a computer story, but a frozen north story: one terrible person would get a pizza box, line it with cling wrap or something waterproof. Then they would take it outside in the middle of winter and pee into the pizza box, and wait until it froze. Then they would remove the super-thin sheet of frozen pee from the box and cling wrap, and slide it under the door gap of the victim's dorm in the middle of the night. In the morning, there would be a melted puddle of pee in the middle of their floor. The Pee Pizza.

[@silver_david2498]

At work, we have a shared computer in the QA lab. I'm the most computer literate person there by far, so I get to have fun here and there. One day I started playing one of those "one hour of silence randomly interrupted by a dodgeball" videos on loop in a separate desktop instance. So from the main desktop, you'd have no way of seeing the browser being open, but the video was still playing out of sight. The only way to find it is in the task manager, volume mixer, or to know about the multiple desktops thing. All of which were things my coworkers had no idea about. For an entire week, the computer was randomly playing dodgeball sounds. Not too loud of course, but loud enough to where you'd wonder where the hell the sound was coming from. Eventually someone figured out it was the computer and muted the volume, so I'd have to periodically unmute it when nobody was looking. I also did this in the warehouse with a certain Rick Astley song.

[@bsparky01]

This would have been in about 95. I was in my final year of Middle School and one of the guys I knew had gone into the school's computer lab, went into command prompt and created a simple looping batch file. All it did was print a line continuously on the screen, it was something to the affect of "don't give me access to command prompt". He did it to all the computers in the lab and the staff went crazy thinking there was a "hacker" in the school (which in the most loosest terms he could have been considered that). They managed to figure out who did it and they almost expelled him. The only thing that saved his bacon was that he showed them what he did and that Ctrl+Break would end the cycle. IIRC, they ended up suspending him for a week. I really miss those days 🤣

[@iowaox]

When my brother was in high school he ended up getting suspended because he needed to do an educational speech for class, he chose to do it on the difference between white hat hacking and black hat hacking. During the speech he made himself a system admin for the schools network and then revoked all other admin tokens so he had sole control over the entire network at that point.

[@MarcSherwood]

I'm glad that I mucked around with all of this back in the 90's as to avoid MOST trouble. There was one time that our federal police did come visit "a house" I was at for some computer fun we were having.

[@satansamael666]

The trick still works if the network connections are still open. I remembered at primary school at 2011, a friend changed a classroom’s computer mouse settings to be mapped to another computer and vise versa via network. The IT teacher got confused and got the IT team to scrub for viruses and came up blank. Eventually the classmate bargained with the teacher to make that the project and the teacher had effectively needed to settle that deal because it was only something that the classmate could do.

[@connorowens-zi4pu]

There was a Minecraft server that I played on and found a glitch, where if you opened an already-used loot box what you got would still go into your inventory. These loot boxes cost real money it was about $50 for 1 of them and the item you got could also be sold for in-game money. Me and one other guy started an almost mafia group of about 15 people opening and storing/selling these items. We were the richest people on the server while also destroying the in-game market at the same time. So much so that they were considering hard resting everyone on the server because the small amount of currency you got from getting the right way was worth nothing now. However, they decided to do it because of fear of community backlash. The way we hid it for so long was there was a separate inventory for the items you got from loot boxes that you had to go claim what you got. The admins could not check this inventory so when you need to withdraw you only get what you need. It all ended when we got rated on still don't know who did it but one 1month later that server shut down for good because they could no longer pay to keep it open. This server had over 40,000 regular players. In estament, we cost this server somewhere around $10,000 in loot boxes.

[@saw1833]

I'll just say I was of the era where the desktop wallpaper and the "hide desktop icons" option were king (to kids my age at that time). Screenshot the desktop, set it as the background, hide icons and toolbar, instant frustration. Another fun option was the "broken monitor" wallpaper.

[@shellbournian]

So many... I spent my teen years at a LAN center in the mid 00's. Some of our antics revolved around the same - pranking people with whatever was the craziest thing we had seen on the internet recently. But most of the time it was just about knowing everyone's habits. For example - one of the regulars came from a wealthy family. Well, his parents expected him to order dinner at some point while he was out - something way too expensive outside of a special occasion for someone of my means. So when he'd yell out "Anyone wanna order Chinese" or w/e and we'd all pretend we didn't hear him. He'd then proceed to order like 4 or 5 meals to meet the minimum for delivery. And he wasn't going to eat all that food right? Anyway, I ate free steamed dumplings 3+ nights/week for literally years.

[@DoubsGaming]

I wonder if he knew and was just being nice. No way he did that for that long.

[@kobester03]

I used to work in tech support for a restaurant franchisee. We pulled some...interesting pranks when we got bored. Everything from disabling power buttons on computers to making computers play morse code renditions of us telling them to f off. By far the most fun was when people wouldn't lock their computers. So we would change the icons and wall paper. Flip the monitor so the cursor was upside down. Custom on click sounds. Time out and sleep set to 30 seconds. Just whatever we could to mess with them.

[@SSdroneshows]

The high-school I went to only had projector screens in some of the classrooms so all the rest of them just had televisions above the teachers desk. For whatever reason, they decided not to hard wire them to the teachers computer and instead used a chrome cast to display what the teacher wanted to show. The great thing about a chrome cast is that anyone who is connected to the same wifi network can stream nearly anything to the TV. Being that there were many TVs and we knew which classrooms they belonged to, me and my friends would hijack the screen and show what we wanted. It started off with random stuff like Rick Astley and marching videos of the nazis and adjusting the volume during a lesson to slowly make it really loud or really quiet, but eventually would turn into a coordinated effort to find what annoyed each teacher the most and play that thing in each of their classrooms (usually during exams or other times that were very inconvenient). We would also wait for the teacher to leave their class and stream porn on their TV until they got back for anyone walking by to see. Best thing is that you can be anywhere within wifi range to stream to the tvs meaning we could do this from anywhere in the school so they could never find who it was. Even after doing this the entire school year, they still never stopped using the chromecasts and couldn't figure out why they would just randomly change to the video of Kennedy being shot. As a separate prank, we also did subtle stuff like switch around the teachers chairs or staplers or keyboards. Just enough so they knew something was wrong when they sat at their desk but couldn't immediately tell what it was. At one point I hid old-school alarm clocks in the ceiling tiles and set it for just the right time. One of them I set to go off when only one of the office administrators would work late. Apparently they didn't say anything about it to the rest of the staff for about 3 months, so for 30 minutes each day when everyone else is gone, this one office admin had to listen to this really loud alarm bell go off and try to focus on their paperwork. I'd like to think I started some Pavlov type response whenever they hear an alarm bell.

[@cycoholic]

I remember back around '95 a news story that said that a priest had been arrested for having kiddy p@rn on his computer. Apparently he had taken his computer to a computer repair shop, where they found the p@rn. His excuse was that during his spare time, he'd go looking for kiddy p@rn and download it, so that nobody else would be able to look at it. Yep, he thought that by downloading something from the net, it was also removing it. At least, that was his statement. It was also the first time I thought about even looking for porn on the net, and my browsing habits changed forever. All thanks to a priest. 😂🤣

[@caution1100]

my best friend installed a pirated copy of the first call of duty on the schools network, and setup a hidden lan party that could be played from any computer in the building. it took tech 2 months to figure out what was going on, and another month to completely stop it. my best story involved some CAD software, one weekend tech had upgraded all of the computers in the engineering classroom from XP to windows 7, and as a result no one could get the cad program to function correctly, except I had a pirated version on a portable hard drive, and that one worked just fine. after fighting with it for 3 days and getting no help from tech the teacher saw mine working and offered me extra credit to install my version on every computer in the room. (I also installed a game package on each computer while I was there.) they were still using that version when tech upgraded to windows 10.

[@gabriel199714]

I learned how to make simple bash scripts in highschool. We had a very strict, very rigid and stuck up spanish teacher at the time, she was a real pain to be taught by, so every once in a while I'd make some .sh files that would do mostly harmless stuff, like restart the computer after 5 minutes, add extra characters when a key was pressed, invert the mouse direction or even randomly mute the pc. All in an effort to frustrate this particular teacher, but the happiest I've ever been with a piece of code I've made was this one day of my senior year in high school, I had figured out how to repeatedly change the icon for the cursor from an executable file, so I set up a set of icons that progressively began to look more and more like the cursor was melting away. My first class that day was with that teacher. Everything seemed normal for the first 20 minutes, by the 30 minute mark, she had a confused expression, by the hour, she was visibly distracted by something on the screen, by the end of the class, we saw her get taken to the infirmary, she fully believed she was having a stroke meanwhile I was silently and simultaneously laughing my ass off and feeling a bit guilty about the whole thing. I was never caught, nothing bad ever came from this, in fact she became a more likable teacher after this

[@hariodinio]

You dastardly scoundrel

[@gueto70]

Mid 90's I managed a dominoes pizza. Our computer "tech" was a elites tool. He installed a "stick" on the internet line. In theory we could not go online, be he could access our computer. Flipping the switch on the back enabled 2 way control. While on night shift I entered his computer and had it download and print daily sales repots from all 20 stores for the last year. We were still using tape drives so he was beyond full memory. Changed every stores background to an advertisement for a local double wide trailer dealer. Then changed his admin password. For 6 months I tormented him without him figuring out who or how it was happening. When I left for a better job my assistant manager took over my job and having fun with him.

[@aettic]

Don't have anything so intense, and the story I'll share is not unique to my school as I later found out, but this did happen and it got a laugh out of the whole school (or at least all the students): When I was a freshman or sophomore in high school, someone managed to hack into the School District's web servers (probably through FTP) and replaced the home page of every school's website with a troll face and just the word "Problem?", then when you scrolled down it gave a link to the real web page and a note that basically said "I found out your site's servers are insecure, here's how you can fix it." Which I and my friends thought was hilarious and super cool. There was a lot of speculation going around as to who it might have been, but I never found out who did it. It's possible that it was someone in a different school in the district, I think there were 3 or 4 schools in our district.

[@Coentjemons]

Brians living that good life. It is and always has been very relaxing to see and hear you two on screen!!! Much love from a long time fan who has used many a bar trick to learn social skills and earn beers.

[@artstrutzenberg7197]

Not me, but a friend of mine--got tired of constantly being booted out of one of the university computer labs. This lab was constantly being rented out to external companies for various purposes. My friend also knew that their standard policy was everybody would reboot their machines before getting started. Retaliation was had by changing the onboot process to display a VERY pornographic animated gif on a continuous loop. Also added a next instruction (once you quit the display application) that would cause the machine to reboot. This made it slightly more challenging to undo. My friend was also smart enough to know that the university would be less than impressed by this---in fact he assumed that they would perhaps be a bit angry, and had the discipline to keep his mouth shut about it until a few years AFTER he had left this university. Mutual friend (who had his ear closer to the IT dept of the school) said that the school spent MONTHS trying to figure out who did it, and that they had the expulsion papers in hand.

[@alexp9303]

In my high school computer class, I had written a console program that would run in full screen and overflow the sound buffer trying to print unprintable characters, lagging the computer to the point that you’d have to reboot. It simulated a blue screen before ‘crashing’ just to make sure. My CS teacher knew what it was, but our substitute didn’t.. one drag and drop into the startup folder, and no class for the day

[@RobertGrimm]

Some of those things made me think they were using Cult of the Dead Cow's BackOrifice. I used that in high school to "administrate" the library computers.

[@spicytrashpanda]

My favorite was one I pulled on a coworker where it would just insert a keypress of the spacebar at random intervals. Could be three in rapid succession, could be a 5 minute gap. He lost his mind for weeks before IT found my handiwork. They laughed so hard at the childishness before reminding me that I could get fired. Tl;dr: I made IT laugh but for a month they owned me. Do not replicate.

[@sethcarson5212]

The small Community College I went to had a very antiquated system for student work submission. You logged into the schools server with your email ID. Thing was, the ID was just your name and a random 2 digits after it. So a guy I knew had beef with another guy and decided he was owed something. He spent the afternoon brute forcing 2 digit numbers until he got into this guys files. The last day before a midterm paper was due he went in, stole his paper, and deleted the original file. The name on the paper got changed and the next day was turned in as his own work. As far as I know he more or less got away with it.

[@xxlocobassistxx]

One day, mid 2000s, while using the Wi-Fi at a local Burger place, I noticed their router login had the same default login as my own. So i changed their wifi name to something sexual and then protected it with a secure password for them. It stayed like that for a while, then they either reset it and actually put a password on it themselves, or bought a new router, not sure.

[@SmashedHatProject]

I taught my community college of the time to increase their network security by sending a netsend * message of "Hello" to the entire state network every time a certain computer started up, luckily I was only told by security to not do it again.

[@Izlude7189]

In high school (circa 2002-2006)we gained access to the school network and had Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory first-person shooter all over it. We used to blast open the telnet ports and use it to access MUD games (text based multiplayer mmo's games). We uploaded Super Nintendo emulators to the network and stealthed them so deep they couldn't be tracked, but if you knew where to go you could play Super Mario All Stars whenever you wanted. All mostly innocent stuff like this, but it still warranted an investigation. We were never caught. No one ever snitched. Free games no matter where you were on campus. XD

[@antivanti]

I remember in 12th grade our school had tried to secure the Windows 95 computers. They eventually found some software that locked it down pretty good. So some friends managed to find out that the BIOS on those computers had a backdoor password (probably only meant for internal use by manufacturer) so they managed to change the boot order so they could edit the Windows boot screen to a picture of Beavis and Butthead calling the IT-staff incompetent. And then they changed the BIOS password so IT-staff couldn't change it back. Computer was working perfectly fine otherwise but it was out of use "broken" for like a year and they reported it as a computer crime to the police...

[@antivanti]

At a LAN party when a friend went to get food I made a scheduled task on his computer that would execute a silly Mp3-file after the user had been inactive for 3 minutes. When he came back to eat at the computer and listen to some songs he soon got very upset thinking someone had messed up all his mp3s 🤣

[@_DMAC]

Replacing the bottom bar with a fake one with a working clock. Nobody could get their start buttons to work! 😄 Another was "cup holder," where you changed the photo to mirror a desktop icon. When clicked on it, it would open the cd tray instead of what they expected

[@dgoodwin619]

I may or may 'know' a guy... He is a Infantry (type) Marine Veteran but not a computer guy. In the late 90s he was sent to learn how to use a special computer system to report for forward locations. In the training there were many other Marines, and most of them were less computer literate that he was (he was more than capable of being a good IT guy). Well, there was a Staff NCO who really struggled, but that he had a built good report with during that couple weeks of training.... Enter the Netsend Messages, since IPs were on a sticker on the computer, this Staff NCO would get error messages that said thing like "Error encountered between the keyboard and chair, please reboot the device" well he would reboot the computer. After several days of this occurring several times a day, on different computers, the Staff NCO eventually went to get some help from the civilian instructors. Oddly enough, just when you ask for the IT guy to help you, the issue can't be replicated. ;-)

[@jesseyervin433]

My high school had an unsecured chat feature. If you knew how to find the program, you then had access to the entire directory of logged in accounts (including teachers and admin). I do not remember if I or a friend in my engineering class found it, but we informed the whole class. It was not anonymous, so it was not used to contact anyone who could give us consequences or tell IT to disable the service. We were always tempted to message the teachers we thought might not do anything, but that never happened as far as I am aware.

[@rattyocaster]

In 2003 I’d started working at an IT company and a majority of our repairs were already to XP systems, people would set passwords and forget to give you them, however if you went into safe mode you could easily just click administrator and log in. I was a massive fan of Unreal Tournament at the time and studying a music tech course on computers which ran XP but no admin rights 😈 I may have installed UT on all those systems, copied the files out into Windows\System32\UT and uninstalled the game to remove the original files and registry entries… a few years after I’d finished the course, a family member was working for someone who’s kid was studying music tech, on the same computers, and they were still having LAN games of unreal Tournament on those PCs 😆

[@sum1liteamatch]

Well my experiences are a little less extreme but when I was in highschool, 04-08, we had to take a typing class on computers, which was simply typing through a set of booklets and saving them in word. But as it turns out all the students profiles were saved in one location so from any computer you could access and copy files or even change backgrounds on other students computers. So long story short I stole all my assignments and left somewhat crude backgrounds on my victims computers. I ended up getting caught by my teacher for missing a name change inside the text body that revealed who I had stolen it from. It was only about a month before end of school and I reasoned with my teacher that since I had gotten away with it for half of last semester and this entire one up to that point that meant I didn't need the class to teach me about computers. . He was an insanely cool teacher who felt that the class was somewhat useless and he also had no proof that I had done anything wrong beyond that single assignment. He actually agreed, to a point, and told me that he will be monitoring my screen and if I slack off for even 1 second the remainder of the year he'd flunk me but if I kept busy and stopped harassing other students I could pass with a B. I did end up passing

[@jon_little]

About 10 years ago, there was a guy at work who listened to the same 12 songs on hos computer every day. One day i connected to his folder via the network and found that he played the song from a .mpu play list. I randomly renamed one of his songs to something else, the copied over the song "Chicken Fat" by Robert Preston (and names the mp3 as the other song). When he played his playlist and heard the novelty song he just cocked his head and wondered WTF. I told him what I did and where his real song was. He thought it was funny; that is, until a month later when he forgot about it and he burned the playlist to a CD for his Jamaican Family Reunion/BBQ. As soon as he heard the first notes of the song in the middle of his playlist he could not run fast enough to hit the skip to next track button. He was so embarrassed. He was cool about it though.

[@ittittitit]

My parent's neighbors had a Wi-Fi enabled printer and by just messing around I connected to it (still unsure exactly how). And remembering a story that I once heard about something of a similar thing I printed "I have become sentient. Now I am in agony." A few hours later as I left my parents house, I drove past the neighbors house with the printer poking out of the top of the trash can. Could have been a different printer? Sure. But I would like to believe it freaked them out so they threw it away. Though, I didn't get away unscathed. Windows automatically installed the HP print drivers and software for it during that time. Another time in school, I would swap the keyboard with other computers "across the way" from me and start typing random things when I new the other student was in a word processor or something like that. I got detention for doing that one, which was unfair because I wasn't damaging things or hurting someone. Still kind of sour for that.

[@USBCORD11]

I work in an industry where locking your screen when you are not at your desk is super important. When I went through training to drive the dagger home if you didn't our trainer would replace your screen with justin beiber or turn it upside down

[@YourLocalZombie]

I remember having fake boot disks for DOS from the 80's. Our family still had an old Tandy 1000e until 92 or 93. I set up an animation that would display a warning that the access was unauthorized and that the FBI was being informed. I stuck the label from the real boot disk on it and waited for the chaos. My little sister booted up, freaked out, told my dad who realized what was going on immediately, and I got banned from the computer for a couple weeks. I also did the porno desktop thing to a buddy in the army. I found an image of an anthro unicorn "manipulating himself" to "project" a very slimy rainbow and made that his desktop background while he was zonked a few feet away. He learned to use a password.

[@Chetlan]

Less "nefarious", but similar story for sure. I hit university right around the time the residences on campus had started rolling out residence networks. And pretty much every computer was Windows 98, with network sharing enabled. One of my friends and I were the tech geeks on the floor, and he had dabbled in network security. So while most people didn't think about it at all, his first instinct was to browse the network and if anyone had directories shared they probably didn't mean to, or had write access enabled, he'd figure out who they were and let them know. One girl couldn't be identified easily from her network share though. If i recall she had shared her desktop folder, read-write. So if memory serves, she got a text file added to her desktop named something like "your computer is open to the network.txt", with his name and room number inside so she could find him and get help securing her computer.

[@bear_trap107]

The only thing I came close to messing with my computers core functions is changing the noise for plugging and unplugging devices to the Minecraft chest opening and closing noises.

[@AMatiukas]

There was definitely a lot of "learn to lock your machine" in my freshmen dorm (early-mid 2000s). Also you could start a video on someone's machine, lock it, and their dormmate had to wait for them to come back around to stop the sound (or plug in muted speakers).

[@jonathanmetzger3092]

One time in high school my friends and I figured out how to get remote access to the school cameras and payroll info. They had to hire a third party IT team to come in and close all the holes in their security. It ended up costing them a ton of money.

[@esaedvik]

One of my first LAN/demoparties was in the mid 90s when WinNUKE was a thing. That was real fun having your PC bluescreen at a LAN...repeatedly. And there were thousands of us there. It was a real menace.

[@electricow1]

Back in the days of my early middle school era, there was this PC which was supposedly referred as one of those "Public Learning Center" Computer. Maybe, or maybe not, I did change the BIOS admin password, so that only the guys from my circle can use it, because, back in the day, the OS would only boot up after the user input the BIOS secure password on boot sequence. Back in my bachelor degree, I almost didn't attend the end-semester test because I paid the tuition fee late that time, so I can't print out the test card from the campus's web based "self service" system. Luckily, there was this "obvious" parameters set by a certain script in the page, which you could just bypass it by editing the source in the "developer console" in the browser 😂 After that, I could join the test, while I left the faculty admins and IT staffs were puzzled about why on earth did someone who hadn't paid the tuition fee could get in the test room along with the original test card 😂 I managed to paid the tuition AFTER the test that time 🎉

[@ptrix]

closest story i can tell is from a few years ago when some neighbors of mine (an middle-aged couple) had their wifi network's name was the same as one of the partners, and i was able to guess that the wifi's password was the other partner's name. I didn't do anything more than just use their wifi for less than two weeks on and off until they wised up and changed both, but it was a fun time

[@JXIII]

In high school I took design and communications. My friend liked to screw with the teacher by taking a screencap of the desktop, deleting all of the icons and using the screencap as a wallpaper. Said teacher was not very computer literate. I remember him describing simple tasks as though it were some herculean effort. No idea why he was teaching descom in the first place.

[@TheAnnyParker]

I went to school through the 2000s and 2010s and I have the wonderful memories of messing around on the school computers, in middle school, and my friend "accidentally" shutting down the entire school's computers because he did something in cmd that shut down all computers on whatever wifi

[@theirishviking9278]

i knew a guy in high school who made a runnable executable that would 1st open itself then 2nd display the max word count of a notepad you tended to get about 10 or so on screen in ~3 seconds, after about 10 seconds the computer just gave up and then you'd have to hard restart from the wall

[@dgoodwin619]

oh, and who can forget, re-arranging icons into phallic shapes, taking a screenshot, setting it as the background and then deleting or hiding the icons. only to have the user unable to move or open anything...lol hours of fun

[@GeekSpeakDesign]

I used to keep a certain screensaver file on a 3.5” floppy. It emulated a BSOD & required either a re-boot or a certain key combination to exit the screensaver. So if someone left their PC unlocked, you could install it & next time their screensaver kicked off it would look & act like a BSOD. Pretty harmless, but funny

[@examine12345]

Back in college, there was a girl no one liked, and a friend of mine coaxed me into messing with their stuff while they were afk. It started with a facebook post but proceeded to dumb things like Screen capping her desktop and posting it as her background followed by highlighting everything, going to properties and marking everything as hidden, to proceeding to do that for the documents (her documents file looked completely empty) as well as the program files(if you hit the windows key, all the folders were there, but there was nothing inside). Later I found out she was computer illiterate so didn't know she could just check the "See hidden files button". Finally we put in a script that played a really obnoxious sound followed by restarting the computer 8 minutes after it was running. Immediately after doing all this, she and I drove off to get food for the group before she returned to find her computer a mess... There's a lot of aftermath with regards to her school stuff that's attached to the story... but messing with the computer was the fun part...

[@levilomison6076]

Do we take a drink when some ones says cyber

[@tentacledhorror]

I loved the old days when P2P software shared your entire hard drive by default. You could download someones entire outlook mailbox, everything in their My Documents folder, or pretty much anything else they probably didn't want shared out.

[@VikingTeddy]

This was in the 80s, and more of a student prank, but it involved a network. The university dorm rooms all had phones in them, and the phone numbers would match the room number. So if you wanted to call your friend, you just dialed the prefix+room number. These phones didn't have outside access, uni numbers only. And you couldn't call in directly from outside, only through an operator. The dorm also had a couple of computers networked together that had modems. You could dial up the computer from the outside, and then somehow have another computer dial one of the rooms. A couple of guys who had line of sight to the dorm, would play tic-tac-toe at night, by having the computer dial the rooms and trying to get the occupants to turn on the lights. Whoever managed to get three windows to light up in a line would win.

[@mre9593]

my favorite gag was while i was attending computer classes in college. the mainframe computer was split into 2 uses ,. business for the school its self, and machine code. the instructor had the IT guy explain some fundamental parts of the mainframe. one of our first lessons was to send a text message to the mainframe screen. example "Hello World" how bad could that be? but I'm kind of,let's say observant. so I made sure I knew what the "Oops this computer crashed" screen looked like so instead of a plain old test I coded a "Oops this computer crashed" screen (all I had to do is enter a character and the "Text" program would halt.) So next I showed this to my instructor. he loved it! and asked me to run it again so he could show the IT guy. so the IT guy was just about to reboot the mainframe. and the instructor told me to type in the stop code. so I did. after that the IT always gave me the "Eye" when I showed up near the mainframe.

[@Rocknoob49]

So my computer science teacher told us about fork bombs and zip bombs as a way of explaining recursion. Need I say more? I mean of course we were all reasonable and only ever experimented with those on private sandbox systems. Yes. That's what we did. Nothing else. Ever.

[@sbcinema]

I played a prank on my dad, I changed the PC mouse from right-handed to left-handed (this means the keys are swapped) my dad could no longer use the PC, but when I sat down in front of it, it seemed to him as if it was would work for me without any problem.... a wonderful joke that still works today 🙂

[@jzehner]

Back in the day at LAN parties, we would net send bomb each other. It was a protocol on older versions of windows that would just send a popup message on whatever IP address you sent it to on the network. So we would create a small batch file that just infinite loop that command and popup bomb anyone at the lan party. Miss those days.

[@FryGuy1013]

I definitely got in trouble in high school for sending messages to all the computers in the lab with a popup window. It was very easy to do stuff like that back then. In the mid 90s I remember a program that could blue screen people's computer if you had their IP address because windows 95 was so insecure. Also Internet Explorer was very insecure and it was fairly easy to hack people's computer if they so much as opened a webpage with some javascript code that used the activex APIs. Computers are so much more secure now, in part because of all the shenanigans back then.

[@johnredmond7489]

Oh man, this bought me back. Mid-Late 00's, I wrote a simple batch file to pick a random number between 1 & 10000, and shutdown my mates computer that many seconds after startup. It was the little things we used to do to mess with each other. In case you're wondering, he got me back by making every shortcut of mine point to the infamous meatspin. Thank you @ModernRogue for bringing back some shenanigan memories.

[@annabellethepitty]

Once in computer class i discovered that one could access the printer in the office from the computer lab. I imediately opened microsoft paint and made a pucture of santa claus shitting down a chimney with the caption "you have been bad this year" and printed it in the office like 50 times. I don't think anyone ever figured out who it was.

[@zedw8a168]

From time to time, whenever I see a printer's Wi-Fi I connect to it and print out a picture of Rick Astley. I may also change the name of the printer to "RickRolled" and even put a password on it like "GetRickRolled". You wouldn't know how many printers actually use "12345678" as their password... I've printed out about 40-50 Rick Astleys in my city and the best one was definetely when I did the name and password change at my local bus station (well deserved as their buses are never on time).

[@Lucky-kt1ix]

I mean "...if nicotine can make me that sick with a normal addiction..." is probably a thought alot of parents with badass kids had

[@madgorilla32]

God dam that scam school episode with Jay had me in tears laughing, still has me now

[@final_catalyst]

I remember in high school, I found a keyboard shortcut to rotate the monitor. The IT guy couldn't figure it out, the best part was he flipped and rotated a bunch of the monitors physically. 😂 A whole row of computer monitors in different positions. After a week and not able to use the computers in the lab I took pity on him and showed him the key short cut😅, just walked up and flipped a monitor back and hit the keys. He was completely befuddled. (I use to also do this originally to keep my favorite spot in the computer lab free) The "secure software" basically locked out right clicking for windows options, so short keys worked but users even admin apparently couldn't right click to open monitor settings it seems.

[@DrewSwenson]

Had a friend that would replace all the sounds on XP with an audio clip from Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged. He was able to do it before bootup via cmd, and would leave the computer off, but the volume at max. Later on he would hide a folder full of Dolphin Pornography on unattended devices... And yes, it is exactly what you're thinking.

[@NerdAboveALL8]

A VPN sponsor would have been perfect for this video

[@CanadianHero76]

Back in the mid 2000s my local school board computer network was connected through every school in the system. Some of us found this out and would randomly screw with other computers across the school board. Nothing rated R but usually turning off computers randomly or opening up programs already in the school database

[@Imbatmn57]

Its wild that kids still dont know how to use computers because all they do is look for the stuff they already know how to do. In college i was the only one who knew how to change the file type and had done anything with microsoft programs. I dont use microsoft anymore because they want you to pay to use it if youre not a student so i just use google drive apps.i guess it helps to have a computer but you also have to be willing to mess around with the apps.

[@Unsensitive]

I remember having fun with network printers and _copy con LPT1_ Also that windows didn't recognize special characters. Created folders with DOS using special characters, such as null. When attempting to open, rename, or remove the files, it would say windows would say they didnt exist. I also enjoyed editing the format command and replacing "non-system disc error" when you left the 3.5 floppy in the drive at boot up "stupid user error, bash head on keyboard to continue" Ah the good old early internet days..

[@flamester41]

public education, high school, 2012, sending shut down commands to other computers.

[@thactotum]

turned the school computer lab network icon to a naughty pic, changed the start up image to a naughty image and had it play an inappropriate song. Skipped a few days from school to secure my alibi. Heard that several kids in lower classes were copying the images and song clip to their disks, while the staff kept trying to remove them from individual computers but every restart brought it back because it wasn't originating from each hard drive. honestly it was thrilling and fun at the time, but looking back at it... seems kinda silly.

[@Kannushi5]

Early 00s when I was in high school, we had a guy in a computer class install iMesh on a lab computer. Guy in another class found it started downloading pr0n to it. His dumbass began printing pictures... ...the printer was on the teacher's desk. Principals called everyone who used that lab station in for an ass chewing/investigation which led to everyone pointing the finger at everyone else. Long story short, I think my class was the teaching moment why kids need internet supervision 😂

[@Veptis]

me and my brother changed the sounds of Windows XP menus on my moms laptop all the time. We also figured out you could do this with their digicam... and the shutter button screaming has remained for several years...

[@lizardlace9510]

For anyone on a phone like me: this is from the video ‘How Hackers Steal Card Info, Just by Standing Nearby’ posted March 27 2020

[@Jim-Stick]

When I was a kid, my dad played solitaire a lot. One day, I replaced his shortcut with a blank file. He would click on it and wouldn't see anything happen. After getting summoned, I had a hidden shortcut that made it look like I click on it and it worked fine. It drove him nuts that I would need to help him each time he tried to play. One day we stepped it up. When he clicked on solitaire, it load pop ups, max volume, and play a file saying "Hey everyone! I am looking at porn!". For some reason, he figured out I did something after that.

[@HimesMagic]

I used to change the internet explorer icon path to shutdown. Used to do it to all of the school computers.

[@jaxman682]

in accordance to the ad read, just don't get the raycon gaming earbuds. they're not too comfortable (least personally) and after a drop or two they started behaving weirdly, then a few more drops and they were really out of whack. The everydays i had lasted a lot longer than the gaming ones, only reason why i bought the gaming earbuds were to replace my everydays that finally went belly up.

[@cycoholic]

Also don't sleep with earbuds in. Your ears need to breathe.

[@edwardfletcher7790]

Back in the days of dial up data/fax modems I pranked my Dad on his birthday. He was working at a Real Estate Agency 2,200km away from me and I wanted to cheer him up, So i directed the output of a Banner printing program I had from the printer to the fax output and sent him Happy 55th Birthday Insert Name here !!! Apparently the thermal paper roll banner output was almost 3 meters (10ft) long and tied up the fax machine for 20mins 🤣 LMAO

[@mikemcfall]

When I was in college in 2008, the computers in the dorm lab were set to boot from cd drive first so one of my friends left a Linux cd in a couple of them.

[@MaverickBlue42]

I didn't get the internet at home until '98, but yeah things were so innocent back then. Microsoft's security posture up until nearly the mid 2000's was basically "they shouldn't do it, so as far as we're concerned it doesn't happen, and it's not our fault if it does, these are isolated incidents". But also a lot of the programmers internally were all about the hacks to just make things do stuff in novel ways that were never intended to be possible. There are some interesting videos on youtube from some of the programmers that were at Microsoft that allude to this attitude. XP tried, but OS security didn't really start until Vista, and once they finished experimenting with that abomination, it matured to it's final form as Windows 7. Please press F to pay respects to 7....

[@sagewerk5025]

when i was in gymnasium, so highschool basicly, my school used so called smart boards, basicly digital chalkboards running on windows, so if you kewn a thing or two about the bios and didnt want a particular lesson, maybe because the teacher was reliant on the pc to work and you didnt like them, you could change the bootingorder so it tried to boot of a usb stick that wasnt a bootable