IT Jiggery Pokery

[UKBob]

A mate of mine found an unsecures WIFI connection, and a computer loaded with porn. After messing around with the guys files, he left a message on the desktop saying the chap was a dirty perverted sod etc

The most technical feat I wrote (other than fake viruses, which years ago I convinced a few people had infected their PC's) was probably stretching out my legs and kicking the reset switch on a power bar, causing the computers of a dozen programmers to reboot. Not once, but many times, as I liked to stretch my legs out

[Fer]

I worked for a company that maintained a "Shaft League", named after a self appointed expert Mark the Shaft.

The list contained many IT issues, including someone plugging a PC in, only to find it was plugged into an extension block, into an extension block, etc to the wall, and that this was the final straw, and it took down two whole corales (sp) of developers and testers.

There was a classic one involving two company Volvos, a power drill, and a pump being used to move petrol from one to the other, but that story nearly got the poor editor of the list fired!

Every year we would have a presentation of the best Shaft for the year, and lots of beers too!

[M@H]

UKBob said:

A mate of mine found an unsecures WIFI connection, and a computer loaded with porn. After messing around with the guys files, he left a message on the desktop saying the chap was a dirty perverted sod etc

And what's to say that as he has an unsecured WiFi, that someone else hadnt loaded the files onto his computer without his knowledge..?

It really amazes me when people covertly piss about with other peoples PC's.. I wouldn't want anyone doing it to my Laptop, so I wouldn't do it to other people.

If you* find someone's front door is left open do you go an have a look round their house..?

Matt.
(sorry, a bit of a rant, but its a pet hate of mine)

(*not you directly as I realise it was a mate of yours, not you.)


>> Edited by M@H on Wednesday 4th May 09:59

[burnt]

Most I've ever done is to change the system font to 'symbols' or 'wingdings' in Dixons once or twice.

Takes the staff ages to work out how to get it back.

Mind you that was years ago.

[JonRB]

burnt said:

Most I've ever done is to change the system font to 'symbols' or 'wingdings' in Dixons once or twice.

Back when I was a lad, the equivalent was to program the Spectrums to look like they were loading (requried only a few lines of code) or the BBC Micros to buzz their relays until they burnt out (also a few lines of code).

I did neither, BTW. But I knew people who did.

[wiggy001]

Everyone used to say that Turbo Pascal (programming language learnt at college) really had no use other than as a learning tool.

I disagreed when I created my own login screen to the Novell network and installed it on every pc in the college. Mine was the same as the standard login screen except it saved the user's id and password to a text file in c: emp

You can guess the rest...

[KITT]

wiggy001 said:

I disagreed when I created my own login screen to the Novell network and installed it on every pc in the college. Mine was the same as the standard login screen except it saved the user's id and password to a text file in c: emp You can guess the rest...

Oh a similar theme I wrote a little program in Pascal that I put into the autoexec.bat of all the PCs on our school's Novell network. It's purpose was to send all keypresses over the network to another machine that stored it all in a file

My other triumph was hacking the override password for a program called FutureLock. Our school installed it to prevent us running all programs in Windows 95 except boring ones like Word etc. Considering the cost of the program, I was supprised how easy it was just editing the password file with a hex editor.

I've stopped all this now and work on the other side of the business

[sadako]

User reported mouse problem. User has moved desk and wants mouse from her old PC moved. Helpdesk pass call to site support assuming user has special RSI relieving mouse.

User's old PC had a black mouse. User's new PC had a white one. They were the same model and both were working fine. User was just being obstinate. User left for the day, swapped mice, set tracking speed all the way up, set double click speed all the way down. Users do not have access to the control panel.

If she did it again we were considering hacking the registry to set her screensaver to come on after 1 second...

[bigandclever]

Oh dear. An ex colleague of mine sent me a mail with an executable called beard.exe in it. Being the trusting soul that I am, I double-clicked but nothing happened. Sent him a mail letting him know it wasn't working and carried on with what I was doing. Towards the end of the day my boss came over and wanted to go over some documentation I'd done. I'd saved the files on my desktop and.................beard.exe had changed my wallpaper to be a massive, very close up picture of, let's say for ease of clarity, a very hairy fanny. Oh, how we laughed after the disciplinary

[Fer]

Worked with someone who had worked out a way of sending backdrops to people. You never knew what you would find on your screen. Someone locked down all the other workstations and sent him "eatshit.gif", and that soon put an end to that.

[UKBob]

bigandclever said:

Oh dear. An ex colleague of mine sent me a mail with an executable called beard.exe in it. Being the trusting soul that I am, I double-clicked but nothing happened. Sent him a mail letting him know it wasn't working and carried on with what I was doing. Towards the end of the day my boss came over and wanted to go over some documentation I'd done. I'd saved the files on my desktop and.................beard.exe had changed my wallpaper to be a massive, very close up picture of, let's say for ease of clarity, a very hairy fanny. Oh, how we laughed after the disciplinary

I dont suppose you still have the file?

[sadako]

Got a handy tool at work for running things on other PCs called psexec. psexec \127.0.0.1 cmd will give a command prompt on the other user's machine. We use it to check network connections by getting the user to ping things without annoying the user etc.

You can sometimes make windows programmes open with it...

[BliarOut]

Ahh, PStools from sysinternals..... superb fun if you pause LSASS or CSRSS on a remote machine.... It just stops dead like an NMI

Use pslist to find the remote machines PID and pskill then kill it.... or pssuspend if you want to bamboozle someone

[m12_nathan]

BliarOut said:

Ahh, PStools from sysinternals..... superb fun if you pause LSASS or CSRSS on a remote machine.... It just stops dead like an NMI Use pslist to find the remote machines PID and pskill then kill it.... or pssuspend if you want to bamboozle someone

Don't need to us PSlist, PSKill can run against the exe name

pskill \machinename lsass.exe

is good

[BliarOut]

I didn't know that.....

Sod it, I'll see your pskill and raise you psshutdown

Not that you could run it in a batch file from the windows scheduler against a remote machine and get someone to format their machine in a desperate attempt to cure the problem

[m12_nathan]

I've changed my local policy so only I can connect to my machine, buggered if I'm getting caught up in the office about.

[Hilts]

burnt said:

Most I've ever done is to change the system font to 'symbols' or 'wingdings' in Dixons once or twice.

When I was at Uni SWIM had a summer job working in Dixons helping run the business centre (just a fancy jargon name for the PC section). After he failed to show up a couple of times due to massive hangovers the manager, who never really liked him anyway and had stitched him up a few times, told him he was gonna let him go. So on his last day he set up BIOS and Admin passwords on all the display machines

[scared but happy]

wiggy001 said:

Everyone used to say that Turbo Pascal (programming language learnt at college) really had no use other than as a learning tool. I disagreed when I created my own login screen to the Novell network and installed it on every pc in the college. Mine was the same as the standard login screen except it saved the user's id and password to a text file in c: emp You can guess the rest...

The Apple Mac/Lisa was programmed in Pascal (hence some of the system calls (strings) are in pascal format) it WAS a true programming language that is still used today "Delphi" also very portable in its time (UCSD Pascal on multiple formats) - sorry rant over

[Pigeon]

Pure Pascal is no use other than as a learning tool. For real-world use you need a lot of extensions, which things like Turbo provide (its compiler was impressively quick too).