> At some point, I hit a threshold where the DNS server could no longer keep up and broke. As I later found out, this caused a ~15 minute campus wide outage for managed computers as no computer could make the DNS lookup in order to mount its network drive. IT politely told me to stop spamming the DNS server after this, so I did.

> How’d IT know it was me? I yapped about it for two weeks!

You know, I think maybe the first part is how they found out about you, rather than that they just happened to follow you on social media :)

Ex Vaddio PM here. Like 5 years ago all our firmware defaulted to requiring non-default passwords on setup. We also created a free windows application that can mass upgrade firmware and change auth if defaults were used. We tried!

Saw the Vaddio logo and had to chime in. Gotta stick up for my Minnesota devs.

Causing a 15 minute outage campuswide is not clever at all. A DOS attack was not the goal and it drew unwanted attention. If I was responding to this outage there would have been consequences - not for doing it, but for getting caught. Perhaps a 200 KB/s rate limit on every device associated with the user for escalating timeout periods if the unclever behavior remained attributable.

I am a bit confused on how they were able to access these devices if they stated the network is not allowing routing? I think I may've missed that part in the article.

Did you play the Gandalf smiling video across all projectors?

very nice article!

nice writeup. might be a bit careful though, as far as i know port scanning might be technically not allowed by your campus's it policy... nonetheless great job!

Banger