When I was in middle school in the mid ‘90s, the school library decided to go digital. They installed a bunch of computers with what they called “a boolean search system”. For the first time, you could search for a book by topic in the library and, after a bit of a wait bc computers were pretty slow back then, you’d get a list of results.
Well, us being kids, on the very first day, somebody decided to search for “book”, which of course matched every single book in the library and therefore created enough system load to lock up those poor mid-‘90s computers to the point that they required a hardware restart. IIRC this system was on some kind of a network too and I believe it would also lock up the network such that the other computers couldn’t use the system either. I didn’t know much about such things at the time.
Anyway, word got around immediately and so every single time a class came to the library, somebody would search “book” on a computer to see what would happen and lock up the whole system for hours. This went on for weeks with the punishment for searching “book” on the “boolean search system” becoming more and more severe, and then I moved to a new state so I unfortunately do not know how this story ended.
for several days in a row i’d get to class before the bell. the teacher would hang out in the halls.
i’d hop on his unlocked PC, open command prompt, run
shutdown /r /t 600, minimize the prompt, and walk away.he’d be mid attendance and his computer would reboot on him. a few days in he stepped into the room mid me typing the command. he was madder than i expected, but just “yelled” at me.
At my school, we quickly discovered that the admin password for all the networked printers was the name of the high school. All these HP laser jets had a function where you could upload custom translations for the status messages on the printer displays. So we downloaded the English string set (XML) and made some changes, “translating” for example, “Printer Ready” to read “Paper Jam”, “Replace Toner” and so on. As well as changing the admin password. The school actually RMA’d them back to HP thinking the paper jams were some sort of actual defect, as opposed to an altered status message, and eventually replaced them all with Brother printers. Oops lol
It started innocently enough, some friends writing simple C programs that would output an ever increasing text file containing the letter 'a'. This rapidly devolved into a competition of who could output the largest files the fastest.
We had progressed to recursively launching spaghetti programs competing with streamlined data-dumpers until we started to hit storage limits on the central server.
10/10 great learning experience.
Discovered that the credentials for the library computers (which were helpfully printed on stickers for the forgetful librarians), were in fact domain admin credentials.
Gave myself a domain admin account, used that to obtain access to some sensitive teacher-only systems (mostly for the challenge, but also because I wanted to know what was going on my school report ahead of time).
My domain admin account got nuked, but presumably they didn't know who had created it. Looked up the school's vendor ("Research Machines Ltd.") and found a list of default account credentials. Through trial and error, found another domain admin account. Made a new account (with a backup this time) and used it to install games on my classroom's computers.
Also changed the permissions on my home directory so that the school's teachers (who were not domain admins) couldn't view my files, because I felt that this was too invasive at the time.
That last bit got me caught proper, and after a long afternoon in the principal's office I left school systems alone after that for fear of having a black mark on my "permanent record".
netsend
It's a little command line program included with windows that you can set up to send short messages to computers as a popup box. A lot of printers could use this to tell you your print job was successful, and it was used a lot in libraries and such. And also my high school. They had some cursory protections in place, but if you managed to open a command prompt you could send your own message. You just needed the recipients windows username or PC name.. our school used the standard first letter of first name + full last name, even the teachers. So of course, being highschool, this spread like wildfire and there was a whole semester where everyone was abusing it to troll other classmates or interrupt teachers mid lesson. It was also being used as IM/text before any of us even had phones - you could shoot your friend a message to dip out of class or something.
Everything came to an abrupt halt when a guy was dared to run a batch file that was a single, looped, expletive laden net send to a wildcard recipient. It sent the message on repeat to every computer in every school in the district. Every time you hit ok a new box would pop up with the same message. Supposedly every computer needed a hard restart, including servers. Dude got in trouble, and our printers stopped telling us the print job was successful after that.
I was sent to the IT office with the principal once because I kept searching for the “default gateway ip” in command prompt. I was honestly just testing all kinds of different commands for the fun of it, no malicious intent.
Later in highschool, I did write a command in notepad that would open the CD tray every 30 seconds, and put it on a few friends’ workstations. That was hardly anything advanced, though.
Someone forgot to sign off when using a computer in the computer lab, and by using google chrome you could change the desktop wallpaper. Some unknown person changed it and signed the computer off. The next time that kid used that computer he signed on and was immediately greeted by full on furry porn, with exposed nipples and ass in full view of everyone including the teacher.
The closest I personally got to messing with them tho was just me installing and playing Tony Hawks Underground 2 when I had the chance.
My HS put networked computers in every classroom a couple years before I graduated (so '95 or '96). They put predictable passwords on all the teacher accounts, and all teacher accounts had write access to network shares. Those of us who figured that out stashed copies of the Doom WAD file (the one file too big to fit on a single 3.5" floppy) all over the network under different names. So even after they figured out we were in and started forcing teachers to change their password, there were still a dozen or more copies spread over the network.
Student access was enough to copy the WAD file locally over the 100mbit ethernet if you knew where to look. And we all carried the rest of the game around on floppy. So any time we got access to the computers we were playing doom. We also passed around floppies with different mod files. The chicken launcher was everyone's favorite.
I put tor on a flash drive. It bypassed the schools website blocks, so I could go onto any website I wanted. I mainly just went to YouTube to listen to music while I worked. If I really felt like goofing off, I'd go to friv.com and play a bunch of flash games.
Of course a couple friends had me to go to a porn website, but we quickly realized it was awkward and not as fun to be horny when you couldn't do anything about it.
In college we had a Linux computer lab just for CS majors. At the time we had an HP printer that allowed for updating the screen text with a network command.
The computers were never really shut down, so you could just lock it when away. I wrote a script that cycled through various messages like “PC Load Letter” and “Skynet activated, stand by for terminator” with a countdown from 10 to “Terminator Deployed”.
It really confused the lab techs that would help people with printer issues.
Set up a Minecraft server back when you could run the Java files off of a USB. ran for a while, nothing fancy.
I also renamed every calculator icon to "cockulator". Boy oh boy did I think that was funny back then. (it's still a little funny)
Situation: once in middle school, we had to present something for a class (don’t remember which one) with power point slides
In those days, you had to bring the presentation in an usb pendrive.
For some reason, most of the class didn’t finish it.
I disabled usb ports from device manager.
Saved the day.
My school had a web filter to block YouTube and various other sites that they didn't want students to go to. On the block page, there was a "report site blocked incorrectly" button, as well as a password override for admins to do a one time bypass.
One of my classmates registered a domain that all it did was log the IP address of whoever visited it. He then attempted to visit the site from class, it was blocked, and he clicked the report button. Later on one of the IT admins reviewed the report to see if the site should be unblocked or not, by visiting the site. My classmate then had the public IP address of the IT admin.
This IT admin must not have been very good, because he had a password unprotected, open, telnet port pointing to his computer. So we were able to telnet into his PC and poke around. He had an Excel file on his desktop with the web filter override passwords for every school in the district. That Excel file was promptly shared to as many people as who asked for it and we thought wouldn't rat us out.
We gloriously had unrestricted Internet for several months before the teachers caught on. We were told that anyone who used this password would be found out, and that the school was going to have a "volunteer" community service day for 4 hours on Saturday, picking up trash around the school. Anyone who attended would be pardoned for using the password, anyone who didn't attend and who was found out for using the password would have been "punished" (very ambiguously defined). I did not go to the volunteer day, nor was I punished in any way. I do think that it was just a bluff and they didn't have good enough logging to tell who actually used the password.
I believed that I was being unfairly marked with a biased grading.
I got access to admin privileges, found another students essay from the same class but different timeslot, knowing what grade they got after handing it in early, I changed nothing but the font and name and handed it in to get a full letter grade less than the original student had.
I couldn't keep myself from complaining about it and was suspended over it, but it was a privilege when I knew I was right.
Edit: To clarify, it was the same teacher for both class groups.
I worked IT in a high school for about 10 years. Here are some of the doozies:
- weed stashed in a PC case
- pop tart jammed into a DVD drive
- illicit domain admin account created by a student worker
- script to set porn to be the default background on reboot.
We had these old ass everex (I think that was the brand) 386's that had an one line 8 character display on the front that would display what drive was being accessed and what sector/track it was on. It was pretty useless, until we found the memory address that held the buffer (80h if I remember correctly. We were dumb so we wrote a TSR in turbo pascal that are random times would scroll something like "this computer is about to blow up in 5...4...3...2...1...BOOM!".
I don't think anyone really cared as it was the secondary computer lab used by the programming club mainly, but we thought we were really bad ass.
We all had laptops in highschool, and apparently our IT admin couldn't figure out how to disable the "Upgrade to windows 10 for free!" Popup everyone was getting. Anyone that upgraded to windows 10 got called down to IT had their laptop reimaged. When I heard about it, I figured that they must have been checking OS by our user agent or some other web-based method, as upgrading to windows 10 appeared to kill all of the group policy things. Assuming they had everyone's mac address recorded, you could correlate laptop to user pretty easily.
From then on, every week I would USB boot a different OS. Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 10, Windows XP, etc. I would run each OS for a few days until I got called down to IT, had my laptop inspected, and sent back to class when everything checked out. Drove them nuts, I thought it was funny.
I had some hands-on computer repair training at a private school once. One old machine wouldn't boot, complaining that it couldn't find the keyboard which was plugged into it. I unplugged it while the computer was on. At the time, unplugging a keyboard while the computer was on was... not a good thing. There was a little curl of smoke, a scorch mark on the motherboard, and a sustained tone from the chassis and that computer breathed its last.
Later, in college, I used the "net send" command on random people in open labs just to watch how confused they got.
Don't know if it's called messing with it but installed GTA and pretty much played that any chance I got. Also learnt that "sound" is just an additional aspect of a game I can get by without
One my friends in high school was in the student sysadmin class. He snuck Call of Duty into the schools default image so literally every single computer in the school came with CoD1 preinstalled. We would have massive servers running during lunch and study hall and other break times. It was awesome
Set the wallpaper to a screenshot of the desktop then hid the desktop icons and set the taskbar to auto hide bar. If we had access to the cursor settings, we’d set the default cursor to the hourglass icon too
I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.
So somebody would "start the browser" and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.
I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a "hacked version" of firefox..
One day, after school, I decided to tinker with the Mac systems at my school, and in that process I learned that Mac has a virtual drive that it uses as a setup medium that it doesn't clear, it just un-mounts, when you finish installing. So I just re-mounted the setup drive on the computer from the command line, restarted, booted in like I was setting up a fresh new computer and gave myself an admin account on one of the computers in our lab. Didn't really do anything nefarious with it, but it was a fun little experiment regardless
This was back in the 90s... we figured out a simple way to make 'empty' files using the spacebar ascii and qbasic. We'd have a simple interface, flashing cursor, and you'd type in a number; it would then create an 'empty' file of that many MB.
Of course being 14 yr old little shits, we wondered, how big can the file be? Someone created a file big enough that first it filled the student partition; then the teacher partition; then the temp partition; then the system partition, at which point the entire network slowed to a transfer speed of a couple of bytes. When we realised we could do this, it was happening several times a week.
After that, anyone caught with a blank screen and flashing cursor got in deep shit. They deleted the attrib command so we couldn't un-read-only / un-hidden things, but we just copied it from our own DOS at home and brought it in on a floppy drive
I replaced one of the DLLs (winmm.dll?) with a DLL of my own. It got loaded before the login dialog and installed a hook that saved your login details to a file. This was Windows for Workgroups so no access controls for files.
That way we managed to get the login info for a teacher that nobody liked, then we filled his home directory with porn. IIRC there was a quota of 5 MB and after that the admins got involved.
Modified every boot floppy disk to display „<teacher name> is stupid“ before the prompt.
I still feel bad about that. Mr. E., if you are reading this, I‘m sorry, you were a great teacher and taught us well.
Gained access to the school's domain admin account and fucked with th teachers remotely via Tor.
Wanted to access the teachers calendar because he was a fucking Nazi and stumbled upon VPN credentials to a government-run education network and could've leaked hundreds of thousands of pupil's personal data and school grades but decided against it and shared with admins how I got in and told them how to fix it. Never got into his calendar though. 😶
When I was in high school, I reset the admin password on one of the macs in the computer lab in single user mode and used it to find the school’s Wi-Fi password in the keychain. Shared it with a few friends and it eventually made its way to most of the student body. It was a total game changer for all of us because we all had smartphones (this was in 2014ish) but the building had virtually no cell service indoors whatsoever.
Our school had a local TV station. They broadcast school board meetings and a slideshow of random updates about the township. I figured out how they controlled the music in the background and changed the music to heavy metal.
I came into class the next day and my TV production teacher told me that the school received multiple calls complaining about the music.
This was ~15 years ago. We got a laptop with school credentials on it, but couldn't log in to the local admin account, only our own student network accounts so couldn't do anything fun with it. No problem, install Linux on a flash drive, plug that in, run a script to crack the admin account (thanks rainbow tables) and get in. It was not a very strong password. A lot you can do now. Install games, browse the web unfiltered, and so on, but problem is our use of the laptop was limited to the after school activity we were part of (robotic club obviously) so still not really too much fun to be had unless we wanted to get caught pretty quickly. But there was one thing, we could grab the WiFi password. Turns out that it's only hidden on the student accounts, on the admin account you just click on the WiFi network and it just gives it to you. We didn't plan for it but we didn't take advantage of it. We shared that password to a couple friends but in general kept it under wraps, this was before data plans were so wide spread so it was actually useful, and the school itself was a faraday cage for anything but the weakest cell signal. Best part, it worked in other schools too, so I'm pretty sure it got spread pretty far eventually. I graduated before they changed it, no clue what happen after though.
We also took the balls out of the mice. And put tape on the optical ones.
Put a backdoor and keylogger on the network engineer/networking teacher's computer when I was a TA for his class and was able to get full control over the entire district's network from home. I installed GTA2, Diablo 2 and Counter-Strike onto every machine in the system, then would play with my friends (and even a couple teachers) whenever I had the chance.
The security was non-existent, and after just a month it felt like everyone knew about the games but no body ever found out who put them there. :)
My home room in middle school was one of the few classrooms that had windows pcs. They used deepfreeze to reset them daily, but I found some program that actually disabled it. I think I just installed firefox or chrome and then ran windows updates because they always had the annoying yellow shield system tray icon for windows updates needed.
Not in school.
But i have written a .bat scipt in notepad on an unlocked laptop in a store
Then added the script into the startup folder.
The script would restart the pc after 30 seconds.
shutdown -r -t 30
(R for restart, t for time, 30 means 30 seconds) its harmless.. but also super frustrating
Write it in a notepad file. Save it as a .bat file
In college we had courses on Linux and we were able to SSH on other students' computers. First I used innocuous commands that ejected the optical drive or that enabled the screensaver.
But unfortunately it escalated quickly and soon every student would mess with each other by shutting down the computers...
Loaded quake on all the computers in a classroom. Which were conveniently arranged to make it impossible for a teacher to see all screens at once. And with no effort we were able to play multi-player matches basically every class. A substitute even joined in one time.
Ok, I'm old and this wasn't a computer prank but it's along the same lines.
I used to have a digital watch that functioned as a small universal remote. (It looked like an 80's calculator watch with tiny numbers.)
You did have to program it with the universal code for that brand, but my middle school had bought their TVs in bulk, so the ones permanently mounted in the rooms were all identical models.
I simply programmed my watch to that model, and I'd occasionally keep turning the TV on during a lesson. I did it fairly infrequently, and always in different classes so as not to give myself away.
I never got caught. Back then Tvs only went to channel 100-120ish without special equipment for satellites. If they went higher I would have LOVED to keep changing it to channel 666.
I wrote a program to repeatedly open and close the mechanical CD/DVD drive and put it in the startup folder.
Aside from the computer/s mentioned above, my school was an Apple school. I got around filters by ssh'ing into my homecomputer with XForwarding.
A friend of mine installed the Halo demo on the school computers.
In middle school our one class played this computer game that was similar to SimCity, but wasn't. I found out the save files could just be edited in plain text. So I cheated. I never was very good at SimCity.
Not messing with anything, but I was learning Python in HS and I went to
python.com. At the time it was NOT about the programming language. And it wasn't blocked. That was a shock sitting in the school library.Friends found a way to get our scheduling website to leak our schedules weeks early completely client-side. Because a lot of schools use that website, the information spread and all of a sudden we had people from Kentucky in our Discord server asking us how to do it. You're welcome, random Kentuckians.
Wrote a TSR to beep the speaker gradually longer every time a key is pressed. The programming teacher assumed excessive beeping meant you were playing some sort of game. I'd run it on the PC I was using before class was over to get the next kid to sit there in trouble.
Turned the screen upside down with the keyboard shortcut (whatever it is)
A friend of mine just opened up the Spanish teacher's tower while she was out of the room and stole her RAM. He was in IT and was the student assigned to try and fix it too, which was hilarious.
We put hamster dance on all the computer lab computers and cranked up the volume to max then locked the door from the inside using a trick, so that they would need to get the facilities people to get in. It was really dumb.
Put some VB script (I think) that opened and closed the CD-ROM 50 times inside a startup folder. Did it on all computers. Also put a batch file there that shuts down the computer one second after logging in on all teacher computers.
And last but not least, I created a phishing Facebook page, opened it on some browsers in school, rewrote the URL to a Facebook one (without pressing enter) and left it there, collected some passwords.
Edit: Also installed Ubuntu (dual booted) on the computer I usually used.
Edit2: Disabled the tracking software for a computer I used. Damn, it's all coming back to me! Good times.
Installed VNC software on the classroom computer. Simply added a random character when teachers tried to login to various websites, or closed the current page when they weren't looking.
Got caught after a week, for laughing too obviously on the back row.
Nearly got expelled for "hacking", and all staff was recommended to change their passwords for everything.
They had both NetSupport and DeepFreeze installed. At the time, NetSupport config files could be decrypted with a simply python script, and contained the password. Turns out, it was the general admin password.
So I had admin creds, full control of any PC with NetSupport, and the ability to install anything on a computer and have it survive past a reboot.
What did I do with it? Video games, mostly.
Made a basic script with a nested loop to burn ~20 mins before playing some annoying sounds using the PC speaker. The PC must have been a <=286. I started the script once just before the English teacher arrived and disconnected and hid the keyboard. It resulted in some entertainment when he had to try to silence the PC, but eventually he found the power button.
Figured out how to install a ton of games on school laptops. School was pissed that I was running a Minecraft server
While not technically a school computer. In college we all had to install a WiFi client to access the school's WiFi. It was shit so I started digging around and found the localization files in plain txt. I then, when I had the opportunity to, booted into a friend's computer with Linux and changed the confirm button to say "I'm a bitch". They never asked me to change it, which I would've, so it just stayed like that all year.
Our network had a program called "deep freeze" on every computer that was basically an automatic system restore point.
A friend worked for IT during the summer and got the password to turn it off. I could make any change I wanted and make it 'permanent'. I didn't do this much. My favorite hobby was opening word docs that students saved on shared drives and replacing the word "the" with profanity.
In high school, my friends and I were getting into Ubuntu. We were smug Linux nerds. We came up with the idea of installing Linux on one of the school computers. The challenges in doing so was, how to do so without the teacher noticing and getting into the locked bios. The teacher problem was solved when we got a little bit of time when the teacher would step out of the room sometimes. We picked a desktop that wasn't being used by anyone at the time in the class. The other problem was getting into the bios to boot the drive. Long story short, we were able to switch a jumper on the motherboard to clear the bios settings and let us boot the drive. With Ubuntu installed, it took all of about a day for the school to take that PC to the IT gulag. I think they were very confused and threw it out. We didn't want them to just throw more desktops out so we stopped our shenanigans there.
Notepad could read/write everything so I used it to temporarily disable the dumb software that locked things down to a typing game, a "bible study" game, and Notepad. When they found out I wouldn't admit to anything and they had no idea how I did it. I could literally type faster than the computer could keep up with in the typing game so I could sit back while it caught up to me and still get a perfect score, which really sealed the deal for me that they were wasting my time in "typing class" and it wasn't worthwhile to punish me for whatever it was I did that let me take over any school computer I wanted without apparently changing anything about it that they could figure out.
I ran a cgiproxy instance with proper ssl certs that totally bypassed and trivialized the school's internet filter. It was password protected with unique passwords per user and I had it set up in such a way I could tell when a password "got out" and I'd cancel it. It got added to the blocklist a couple times, but I was ready because I'd already registered like 20 dynamic dns services to point to the server. It would take them months to add it to the manual blocklist but just a minute to change a link on my forum so people used the next address in line. It was an open secret that I was running it, but I was pretty smart in how I ran it and who I provided access to. I also ran a forum that was popular with the student body and the passwords to the proxy were given out there, but only to people I trusted and could reasonably deduce who they were. Even then they didn't know it was me running the whole thing.
I mean most people probably did, but again I did it in such a way there was never any real paper trail. I never made any money or wanted any clout for it. I just thought it was fun that I got pissed off at the internet filter blocking newgrounds one day and thought "absolutely not", and basically trivialized the filter schoolwide.
Used netsend to send dank memes to every connected PC in the school.
I'm old enough that typing 55378008 into my scientific calculator and then turning it upside-down absolutely fits the criteria.
I graduated in 2000. During my 11th year, I had an economics class in the same room as a computer lab. Over the course of a few weeks, I downloaded a voice synthesizer program, Shit Talker, to all the computers and set up scripts to have them all begin "talking shit" about our educationally worthless instructor (he taught because he wanted to coach sports), all sequentially during a class a few weeks in the future.
What I didn't think about is how I was one of maybe four or five computer literate students in my grade, so I was quickly targeted after it went off. I should have just denied having done it but I was a dumb teen; they were bluffing about knowing it was me and I fell for it. I had computer access revoked for the rest of my public school career.
Soooo...a bit later that year, my father brings home a very small, defunct computer from his work. It was this custom job consisting of a tiny motherboard, smaller than a micro ATX, with a couple of daughter boards for all its peripheral connections. He just stole it because he thought it was cool but, being pretty computer illiterate, didn't know what to do with it. I gutted it, installed the innards in a plastic file folder box, and installed Windows 98. I now had a portable computer! I'd carry it to my classes, hook it up to a monitor, and use that instead. I initially caught flak for it but I was restricted from using school computers, not their monitors.
I realised the school PC’s boot order was A:, then C:, booted into DOS from floppy to get behind their own autoexec.bat, installed my own which just repeatedly echo’d “Teachers suck”.
They had some shitty network config utility, which was relying on a weird script language (from a company called BFC Computers). Anyway, it synced some assets down to customise a series of crappy programs with licenses and “Property of Bangsbostrand Skole” messaging. I changed to it randomly (about once a month, across their fleet or 50-ish PCs) retrieve a different set of strings and pictures which all said “Teachers suck”.
I was banned from the computer lab for a year. They fixed the autoexec issue within a day (after calling “very expensive consultants, young man!!”) but when I left some their PCs would still occasionally display “Teachers suck” instead of “property of” in various programs.
During computer learning in a computer lab 15 years ago, I figured out that the student passwords were sequential, so I could easily guess other students' passwords. If I logged in to their account while they were logged in, they would get booted and I'd hear the inevitable "Mrs Teacher! It says my session expired!"
I did that 2 or 3 times over the course of a few minutes before I got caught. The vice principal rambled on and on about how I was "disrupting learning" and how I "should be suspended for this" before finally telling me, "my mentor taught me a really important lesson. If your students don't hate you, you aren't doing your job."
What a horrible piece of shit.
Disabled secure boot
Loaded windows pe
Backed up utilman
Replaced utilman with cmd
Rebooted
Installed a ninite package containing steam
Booted into windows pe again
Restored original utilman
Reenabled secure boot
Turned out I couldn't launch steam because of AppLocker
My school had a shared drive where anyone could create files and folders. There was one folder where people would put random things (bash scripts downloaded from the internet, pirated minecraft, etc.). I wrote a python program that would display a picture of a pineapple on your screen (no ability to minimise, or move other windows in front of it). I had python installed to one of those folders that only appears if you select "show protected operating system files". I later wrote a remote-control script that communicated by creating files on the network. I was able to control the mouse and keyboards, open applications, take screenshots, and monitor keypresses (I never got anyone to click on it without me telling them to though). Never got discovered for any of it...
In high school, I noticed that our home directories were school ID # + first few letters of last name. The ID numbers were vaguely in alphabetical order, I forget if by first or last name. While the contents were hidden by permissions, I figured out the school ID # of a classmate who had a near school ID # just from the directory name. That was a bit problematic because teachers would use them to post grades in an pseudo-anonymized fashion, the lunchroom used them for accounts, and who knows what else.
I didn't mess with anything, but I did say something to the my tech teacher. She knew I was a sweet kid with a knack for tech and some extra curiosity. She passed me off to the school system administrator, who happened to be a family friend. We talked it over, he asked me not to share my discovery, and that was that. It's been a good twenty years since then so hopefully they're switched to a way of provisioning home directories that doesn't spew PII everywhere.
discovered a workaround that i could get to the C drive, then discovered a program that could change the wallpaper and info text on the computer (the change was local to that specific computer). had a little bit of fun with that a couple of times. i also brought in a USB stick with Linux Mint installed on it and booted to that whenever i had free time (i mostly browsed the safe side of the darkweb [back when it was still interesting] and made keygen music in OpenMPT). fun times those were. also booting to mint led me to fully switch to linux so ye :)
If WinNuke rings a bell. You remember the fun :-)
Open a small program. Type in the IP address. Click Nuke. Target PC immediately shuts down. While it's rebooting you grab it's IP address as your own so it can't rejoin the network. Worked great in a building where every machine had a predictable fixed ip. Some good teenage mayhem.
Uni astronomy lab redhat machines accepted single user mode arguments in grub. Created a backdoor user with uid 0 and wrote some code to play some bleeps and bloops every night at 2am. Only did this to one machine to add to the mystery
Back in the day keyboard and mouse were connected to the back of the computer with identical (but color coded) PS-2 plugs.
Today one would expect that swapping two mechanically identical plugs would result in no major trouble - think USB - but back then COLOR CODES HAD TO BE OBEYED!
Or computer science teacher came to help when our PC won't boot up, tried reset, tried reset again, fiddled with the BIOS, gave up.
That wasted more than halve the lesson's time just for us to swap plugs back to working while he wasn't watching.
Sometimes things simply don't work when the teacher is around...
Replaced one teacher's desktop background with a screenshot of the desktop, then hid all the icons and minimized the taskbar.
Got admin access on one of the lab computers to install something needed for a class, and swapped out a bunch of the default Windows sound effects (login etc) with random other sound clips.
Torrented Flatout 2 onto one of the library computers and found out years later a bunch of kids were still playing it during lunch/recess
Well, back in the day the image file for the boot up screen and shut down screen was easy to find and change. I made some screens images that stated that the computer is being destroyed or they messed something up and the computer memory was wiped.
I feel like this is minor compared to what I've been reading on here.
Hosted a MUD. Three batches of comp sci and related majors busily typed on text- based terminals, apparently programming, but were actually adventuring in Midgaard.
Back in college, the old AppleTalk protocol did auto-discovery, so you could open up the Chooser and see virtually all of the Macs on campus. A lot of people didn't understand network security, or were lazy, so they'd share their drives with guest access.
This was way too easy, so for maximum deviousness and WTF'ery, I'd just make edits to a file here and there.
Nice try, FBI guy. We are not divulging any of our past felonies.
Edit: oh boy, was I wrong...
All mac computer lab (rev a/b iMacs), locked down with foolproof. No problem; bring a zip drive and boot from it by holding down option at startup. Use resedit to edit the extension for foolproof and remove all its resources. Extension no longer works.
Reboot into a completely unrestricted finder. Good times.
Someone in my programming class told us how unplugging (and replugging) the Ethernet cable at a specific time when logging in gave us full network access. I didn't so much "mess with the computers" as "cheat my ass off, because I had access to all teachers' files."
For 5th and 6th period in middle school, in the early 90s, I was in the same lab and had complete access to the computers. Rather, I was in charge of them. I was a TA for one period and it was a free elective for another period. I don't remember the details...but somehow I was there for both periods every day.
The teacher who ran the lab just left it all up to me. So, I installed games on all of the computers. Oregon Trail, DOOM, and Q*bert were the three that I remember.
Students would be sent up to the computer lab, on a daily basis for both periods. A lot of times the teacher who ran it would go run errands since I had it covered. When those kids came up, the entire lab just played games.
Also, since it was 6th period, I'd have the honor of shutting down the entire school network and systems at the end of the day. I'd get to call teachers and tell them to get off so I could shut it down. Some times I wouldn't contact them, and I'd just kick them off the network and shut down anyway.
It was a fun time.
A teaching seminar was held in one of the classrooms that I took a class in. Students came in the next morning to see a username and password on the whiteboard. It didn't take long for us to test it on school computers.
The account had admin level access and could go into any student's directory. This led to rampant cheating on homework and labs.
I used it on my physics labs in senior year. I, and a few others, were caught and had to make up a few of the labs in the early morning in order to be able to take our finals. Also had detention for weeks.
A year later, after I had graduated and was in college for CS, I applied for a job at the school as a system administrator. The guidance counselor was in the room when I was talking to the IT admin. When I left, she brought up how I had broken policy and accessed files via that breach. The IT admin found me in the hall and asked me about it. I explained that I had taken my punishment, made up the labs, and didn't feel that it would affect my work at the school, but would withdraw my application anyway.
I taught to 2-3 naughty friends how to wipe something in the C:\ drive, some windows folder or something like that, and they did it in some Pentium PCs.
The teachers started looking PC by PC without knowing wtf was going on in the middle of the class.
They spent a few afternoon doing kind of community work at the college as punishment.
Does writing an infinitely looping stream of 1s and 0s program on my math teachers ti-84 count?
She didnt know how to stop the program so she took the batteries out
I used them as a sort of thin client into a system that I had root on, so I could do whatever Science demanded of me without asking for access. Permitted, but certainly unexpected!
I would carry a USB stick that just had a VNC client on it. My home server was built from high-end scrap, and was leagues faster than anything the department had at the time, at least for student use.
I also had a Sharp Zaurus I had jury-rigged WiFi into, so I could run data analysis whenever I thought of something. It ran VNC or SSH. This was in the early days before it was called "machine learning" or even "big data". So we take this sort of thing for granted now (hello Google Cloud), but at the time it was magic superpowers to have immediate access to a machine with 4 physical CPUs from a handheld device.
One of the kids in my computer class found out about netmsg and some of us started sending messages to each other. One day I saw a kid fell asleep at his desk, so I messaged him "wake up". It must have spooked him because when he woke up he called the teacher over and they puzzled over it together for a minute. I thought for sure since the name of the computer was in the message box and printed on a label on the computer that they would find out it was me, but nope lol
Another time in the same class I figured out how to create a local account so I could change the theme (it was Windows XP) to one I liked more. The teacher saw it when she was walking by and thought something was wrong with the monitor.
Booted Macs into single-user mode and set a root password, then logging in with ssh from across the room and killing stuff that other people were running.
Had a class that was just taking old computer parts and building working systems. Installed SubSeven on some classmates’ systems and did shenanigans. Came in handy while we played Starsiege Tribes.
I found a blue screen of death screensaver online and I installed it on all the school library computers back my my freshman year.
We could unscrew the chassis of the computer and take whatever hardware we wanted to lol. We never actually got anything but we'd remove the RAM or unplug a hard drive and put it back.
We also found games hidden in certain directories. I even saw someone playing Undertale.
I also found a torrent client running on start up on one of the desktops seeding some movies.
If it counts, we used a program to throttle other devices' WiFi speeds. I forgot what it was called.
I modified the installer for GeforceNow so It wouldn't require any admin rights to be installed. I was playing a lot of Overwatch during class after that.
So many comments are about such major things, where as at most I only really put ThePowderToy into the shared drive for student accounts in my junior year of highschool and once in my freshman year made a simple batch program that all it did was constantly open up command prompts but didn't do anything harmful.
Y'all did so much more interesting and worse things than I did, I swear
I don't remember this exactly but when I was around 10 years old (circa 2007), me and my friends were playing around this ".bat" file that you create using notepad with a specific line which I forgot but essentially restarts your PC when you run the bat file.
We had some laughs during computer class.
During student council meeting, I had the chance to use the teacher/advisor's PC and of course tried this .bat thing for some laughs. Unfortunately this PC was older or something because when I ran the .bat file it didn't just restart the PC but ran into a significant error (I think some important files got deleted). Good thing no one noticed I tinkered with the PC, because the teacher was flustered.
Using WOL to turn them on; fakeupdate.net; using open-airplay to mess with AppleTVs; rotating the screen 180° with Ctrl+Alt+Arrows or sth; sending deauth requests to access points with teacher's MAC addresses
I graduated high school in 1996 so internet access at school wasn't really a thing at that point. It was planned to be introduced in the next year.
Make a forkbomb on classmates computers and run it.
We sent the shutdown command to each others. Next computer class, the command was disabled.
I don't remember messing with the computers thenselves, but I do remember my friends and I finding the password to the public wifi and connecting to it for all of like a day (w/ a VPN so as to not get caught) before getting booted off and the password reset. Rinse and releat a couple times before we couldn't crack it anymore
Seti@home, but if I did it today, it'd be folding@home. Also would boot to a linux live CD and play the one or two games that were on there. Apparently booting a live CD broke the "you cant install any software" rule the school had, so I had to stop.
Idk how much it's really messing with the computers, but once during a standardised maths exam where everything was supposed to be locked down oh all the computers (including preventing you from accessing the calculator), I figured out how to get around that and open the calculator (can't remember exactly how), but anyway I was good at maths so I didn't need it and I thought it would be funny to point it out to the teacher watching over the exam and I got accused of cheating so that was fun
I remember dialing into the college network during the summer to access Usenet and play muds. It was some kind unsecured number, I forget how I found it
I was in our schools computer service team and they trusted the (competent) students way too much. I never misused those credentials but thinking about it now I could have done some hilarious stuff... Anyway. Even without too many permissions I did a thing or two to the computers. I once realised no computer had the BIOS password set. So I set one on a library computer to reserve it for me. Another time i realised you could take the whole network down if you connected two LAN ports directly with each other. That one was more on accident.
Swapped the 300 MHz Pentium III for my 233 MHz Pentium II. The computer was very unhappy with this situation. Mine loved it, and I ran it all the way to 2006.
Learned the default account password and figured out which teachers had not changed their password from the default. Learned that all teachers had access to a share drive with all student records. Read through a lot of information.
Did not look at porn on school computers, because wtf?
At grad event, in front of elderly relatives, was called out for looking at porn on the school computers, other student was credited for breaking into all systems. More pissed about the latter.
I didn't start it but I a shared directory for classes there was a folder nested deep into our programming classes folder that had Minecraft and a bunch of memes about the teachers, was a good time until it was found and removed
Our school computer lab had Mac LC II computers. On them they installed a software called "Foolproof" which would prevent users from making any changes to the system outside of specific directories, iirc. I realized it was a system extension by reading the helpfiles on the computer, and that you could disable all extensions by rebooting and holding the shit key on startup.
The guy who ran the computer lab was not too happy that a 10 year old figured all this out.
Every computer had passworded but active local administrator account, so I think I went with the "how to reset forgotten password" (win7) and arrived to Trinity Rescue Kit, burned it to CD and went on with rebooting and cracking, I didn't have the balls to change the admin pass to my own, just left it empty.
Even got some good snacks for unlocking others assigned computers so that they could install whatever they wanted, mostly counter strike.
"Bypassed" their proxy, downloaded roms and ran emulators. They weren't very happy about that, said I "hacked" them by going to websites their stupid proxy didn't block. I found the logon prompt for the school server, tried to login with my regular credentials, they said I was trying to change my (already good) grades. Oh and ran Linux from USB drives sometimes but they never brought that up.
One time we got around the security for a shared windows folder (Win98). Another time a couple of us printed fake midterms for ourselves on official headered paper. But the one that sticks out is this trojan program I got from my older brother called deepthroat. I put it on a couple of other people's computers that I wanted to mess with, and proceeded to open their cd tray, pop up fake warnings/errors, and other random stuff that a friend and I thought was hilarious at the time. It all stopped when I popped up a message that said "Contacting [name]'s parents..." on this girls computer and she got the teacher's attention about it. He knew what was up and scanned all the computers. He was mad but we didn't really get in trouble. We also did the fake desktop screenshot stuff :D
As a rule I never cheated. But I was a in a very tedious typing course and could already type 60 WPM. So instead of doing all the exercises I edited the user files to make it look like I did well (but not perfect) on my assignments.
I remember in early secondary school there was a weird desktop that would briefly flash during the login process. A friend and I decided to keep logging out and in and furiously click around to see if we could access it, one of the times we did it and that desktop session stayed, there wasn't anything special about it besides a blank windows command prompt, we closed it...
Cut to the school computer systems being down for over a day and noone knowing why, felt pretty scared of being found out over the following week!
Our school used to have a central windows server host and virtual environments for each student seat. They all had only a monitor mouse and keyboard that connected to the server using a username (all started with stu and then the number of the seat) but had no password.
A buddy of mine then went ahead and made a .bat script that somehow simultaneously tried to connect to all student seats, resulting in each of the screens blacking out one by one for a while, then going back to normal.
I ran it for shits and giggles at the end of class, and the teacher saw it, didin't understand what happened initially, got really angry and walked into a few chairs tripping up trying to catch us, and then took us to write a report with the school secretary. I love this teacher, this was one of the funniest moments in school.
Replaced the Windows 95 boot screen with an exact copy where a single black square was changed to red.
Nothing crazy or software related, but screwing with people with a wireless mouse with one of those tiny receivers is pretty funny.
Background on a lab to a high resolution naked mole rat picture zoomed in so it kinda looked like a scrotum maybe, but it wasn't: It was just a naked mole rat.
We had typing as a class, oriented toward business typing proficiency, words per minute, that kind of thing. This was running on PCs with DOS running WordPerfect 5.1
They were all running some network software (netware) so the teacher could see screens and things. There wasn't a school wide network at the time, but I remember finding out how to send messages that would pop up on the bottom line of the screen of one or all the computers. .
.bat files to open meatspin until explorer crashed Setting tasks to open a video file on login
Installed Real VNC server on the machine next to us and connected to it with a small Real VNC viewer window. We moved the mouse over the viewer window from time to time to fuck around with the guy who was using the "target" PC. IIRC we also did the classic desktop screenshot wallpaper prank. In the end they formatted the machine.
Net Send * Hello
Mix that with a c++ loop of While 1 and you have every computer in the school lock up before crashing the network.
In 9th grade (1984), I had a typing class using IBM PC Jrs. I made a quick and very simple breakout game in BASIC one period and distributed to the rest of the class.
A bunch of people at my school would flick the power input switch on the back of the PCs to 110v (240v native in my country) while they were off and wait for an unsuspecting person to come by and boot it up. It'd obviously go bang and start smoking and they'd freak out not knowing what they did to cause the PC to blow up.
Shit move, but having witnessed the shear horror of someone who thought they caused it to blow up was kinda funny.
I was in a programming class in the 9th grade in which we were taught Visual Basic. I found out that you can run other executable from applications written in Visual Basic using the Shell command and that this bypassed whatever restrictions they had placed on our computers. I could open any Windows XP (I think?) admin utility this way. But more noticeably, I could open the previously disallowed crappy space pinball game. I showed this to some of my friends, and they did the same. A few days later, some of them are suspended for, no shit, "hacking," because they were caught playing pinball. Not me, though. I kinda resented that.
Oh, I also did an infinite loop with the "Beep" command in it and this caused my computer to bluescreen and not come back.
On a school Mac I figured out using some command I could create a new admin account. I used this account to gain access to the school WiFi password and admin account password. I found out what a vpn was and brought my own laptop to us instead of the crappy ASUS Eee PC netbooks. The Vice Principal was not happy. They called my parents for a meeting ( I had a lot of issues with many IEP meetings). My parents were okay with it.
We would also pass around pirated GTA 3, GTA Vice City, Free versions of Minecraft, and Halo CE and run them off of USBs.
Kept removing the web filter proxy from all the browser settings lol the it guy got pissed all the time but didn’t have a way to stop us
Modified autoexec.bat (to run a choice with errorlevel excluding to continue all keyboard keys except capital S) with some ASCII art and writings of a virus infection...was the only pc in school at that time...pc got wiped and reinstalled...no one was thinking of exiting the script the stupid way and look around for the causes.
The term "Xennial" always resonated with me. We were the ones that were on the cusp of the ending of the Gen X era and the beginning of the the Millenial era. Also 1979 here.
Permanently Deleted
we installed Duke Nukem 3D on all of the computer lab pc's
We installed quite a few games on the backend server.
- worms
- Unreal tournament
- doom
- Quake
And a few others. They were there for years, if they were deleted we had backups in multiple spots had them there for at least 4 years.
would put portable games on the public network share, apparently they didn't have logs of people putting stuff there
Dropped some extensions on the Mac image servers, toyed with Next machines, all kinds of shenanigans.
I edited autoexec.bat to put it in to an endless loop :P
We had a small computer room with about 30 computers so I ran a dedicated server for CS 1.5 and told all my grade the ip which they used to connect Counterstrike from a usb. This was back in 2006. We would see people connect from the library and other school computers. Was alot of fun running admin mod.
Write a script to create an neverending amount of files. Piratinh games. Trick teachers into giving us their passwords. I could go on...
I had GLTron and Pocket Tanks installed on a flash drive, so my friends and I would just play games whenever we had free time.
I also found a couple fun network based utilities in Windows, and all the computers in the district were on the same network. I was messing with NetSpend one day and managed to accidentally send a message to every computer in the school, which then all promptly crashed for some reason.
I also had fun messing with the netchat application. My mom worked at another school in the district, and one time I arranged for her to open netchat at a specific time while I was in computer lab, so I could connect to her computer from a lab computer and we could chat back and forth.I used to goto cartoon websites and play unallowed computer games, nothing inappropriate, just spongbob stuff, which got me permanently banned from watching spongbob at home.
The school would keep using Internet Explore 6, I'd update it to iE 8. They didn't like that.
I'd also would install some toolbars, there was this one yahoo one, that added tabbed browsing to iE6. :)
Updating to iE8 on only one older computer caused problems, but the newer machines worked fine with iE8. ;)
I would install Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Apple's Safari for Windows web browsers. I enjoyed testing and find the best browsers back then.... Staff weren't to happy though.
I'd change desktop wallpaper to windows XP's Bliss, instead of the schools preset solid colour background.
As i got older, I learned how to write batch and vbs scripts to automate different things, so i wrote a tool to automatically login to some of my required school accounts, without me needing to manually type in my login credentials each time. Staff either didn't know or didn't mind this.
We installed Doom on a couple computers, this was in '97. Our computer teacher had absolutely no idea how we did it. Private schools were fun for running circles around the teachers.
We never had school computers :(
We installed Doom (1 or 2, I don’t remember) in an invisible folder and played via the 10Base-2 network. Those were the 90ies…
My school was running Novell Netware until one day I decided they weren't anymore. I spent far too much time with computers
Set up fork bombs to trigger at random intervals.
Installed ventoy to a 32gb flash drive, turned off secure boot and then load into any distro on the drive
Also had a persistent windows installation on another drive
Install NixOS on them 😈

Netbus 1.70 baby
