Posted by goldenskye 4/1/2025
I discovered that I could access the Startup folder on other employee's machines on the network via Windows Explorer. I put a script in one of my very rule-following co-worker's folder that was something like: dir dir dir dir (x100) echo All files have been deleted.
I watched them from around the corner when they booted up, saw the flood of file names flash across the screen, and flipped out when they read the message at the bottom. They reached for phone immediately to call the IT admin and I rushed out from around the corner explaining the joke. Never got in trouble. Good times.
We copied their "Reserve a year book early poster and save". Then used photoshop to edit it to say "50% off your year books with this QR code". The QR code then linked to a gorilla eating a taco (google this its pretty funny), adding to confusion. The year book committee had a FREAK out and sent out a mass email that the QR code was fake and not to follow it and you COULD NOT GET 50% off a year book no matter what link you followed. Needless to say sparked more interest in said QR code and soon the whole school had loaded a gif of a gorilla eating a taco.
- Two of the VPs at the company were named Jim Collinsworth and Peter Sachs (not their real names).
- For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.
- So, I merged the two VP names and I sent an email blast to the entire company from "Peter Collinsworth" (just swapping first and last names).
- "Peter" Collinsworth's email said something to the effect of "In honor of the 765th anniversary of the establishment of the Exchequer and the signing of the Magna Carta, <biotech-startup-x> is declaring April as 'English Unit' Celebration Month. All laboratory generated results will be reported using the following units: Instead of mg/kg/day, we will use pounds/stone/fortnight ...." etc. etc. etc.
- Well, Jim Collinsworth (real VP) saw the email and even he thought that the email had been sent under his own name.
- So, Jim fired off an email blast saying, "I did NOT send this. I don't know what this is about."
- Everyone soon realized it was an April Fool's joke.
- Jim eventually made his way to my office to say ... "That was really funny. Don't EVER do it again."
I know of several fortune 100 companies that still allow this due to the way they set up email protection with o365 and Proofpoint, ironically. not naming them. I've done similar pranks and got by with the skin of my teeth but would not recommend people do this early in their career especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.
Funny thing is that I cleared my prank with Peter Sachs because he was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but he told me to go for it and he thought it was hilarious.
I didn't clear it with Jim Collinsworth because he was a bit of a jokester himself so I (incorrectly) assumed he'd have no problem with it.
I had a CTO tell me to fill a cubicle with quick drying cement after a prank went wrong but I stalled him long enough to cool down. I knew the building management company would have been furious had I followed orders. The CSO had pranked the CTO with a dongle that opens excel and slowly types "I know what you were doing..."
next time recommend using expanding insulation foam instead, but first cover everything with big sheets of plastic. the victim will still have a hell of a time getting rid of the foam. that stuff hardens...
Or they don't want distractions that are too costly.
The glorious days of open relays, back when spam was in its infancy. Today it's mostly done on a whitelist basis to let tools like JIRA or Gitlab send notifications under the name of users themselves instead of some noreply address.
While it was in quarantine mode, I asked my boss if we could use it for an object lesson in email trust at our next security training. He said sure, got permission from the CEO, and then an hour before the next quarterly IT security training meeting everyone in the company got an email from the CEO's address saying "URGENT all-hands company meeting, attendance mandatory!" (which came from a Postfix running under my desk, sans DKIM validation record).
In DKIM "quarantine" mode, everyone's Outlook flagged the message with a banner or popup or something saying it was suspicious, I think it also had a prompt to auto-spambox future validation failures. Plenty of folks saw that and/or the Nigerian-prince-style typos I put in the "CEO"'s message. They checked with him or IT, who told them congrats, feel free to head home 30min early after the security training.
The more credulous folks that came to the URGENT all-hands were surprised to find themselves in a regular IT security training, no CEO in attendance. We started off with "so today we are going to talk about phishing, sender forgery, and you...".
"...and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were"
Kudos to this guy, at least his prank email was kinda funny.
The email is what turned it from being a speed bump to a major impediment to people, at least mentally.
Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will, and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!".
I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original autoexec.bat to cover its tracks.
We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.
I also remembered another detail: Apparently the same fellow, who had a reputation for smart but also extremely difficult to deal with (I wouldn't know, never met them) also had their fingers in one of the first dialup Internet services in the area, cleverly named DNIS (Desert Network Internet Service, I think? It was basically an Internet connected Linux shell if I recall) but everyone locally called it PNIS. Poor guy.
