Changing someone’s profile (“startup script”) so it would log them off EVERY OTHER TIME. User comes in, logs on, it logs off. He heads down the hall to the helpdesk (who had done this to him), they say “Show me”. Hmm, no problem. He goes back to his office. It took until the third trip for him to get suspicious.
On IBM VM, the command to log off from the system is LOGOFF, which can be abbreviated to any version down to LOG. A fun trick with newbies is to tell them, “Hey, I just found out there’s a LOGO command that will show you the system logo!” (Preferably inflicted after making sure they weren’t in the middle of editing a file, as issuing the command from there WILL log them off and lose their work.)
I worked at a university helpdesk in the early to late 90s. We did most of the hijinx listed, plus more. BSOD screensavers, changing the web browser home page to something annoying like hamsterdance and cranking the volume, remapping keys, etc. Seemed like everyone smoked at the time so there were plenty of breaks to take advantage of when they inevitably forgot to lock or logoff.
I remember back in high school we figured out how to do some light mail spoofing. Lots of fun screwing with the person next to you by sending them an email ‘from’ someone else.
Then, for whatever reason, the computer class had this little ongoing ‘war’ where we’d randomly flood someone else’s inbox by copying and pasting their email address into the ‘to’ line a few dozen times. Then we learned how to use the filters. Set up a filter so that every email you send to me, I send back to you multiple times. If you send me 30 emails and your email box suddenly fills up with hundreds of messages…well as fun as it was at first, it quickly got old.
Also, I seem to remember being able to use certain commands that would display your login credentials. I vaguely remember being able to email someone that I know their password is “$password” (or something like that). I only saw $password, they saw their actual password.
This essay on StackExchange posits that the Secure Attention Key or Secure Attention Sequence feature only made sense in the setting computers were used in back in the 70s when the feature was invented: terminal rooms with several publicly accessible terminals plus a population of young proto-hacker students looking to prank each other.
Back in the late 90s I did a variation of this prank to a coworker. I took a screenshot of their desktop and then pasted red X of death popup into it. Then loaded the file as their desktop.
So what you now have is a PC that appears to have crashed, but you can’t clear the popup and it always appears when you restart.
At a previous job, we all used Windows, which had reasonable security.
But because we deployed software to Linux VMs, we each also had an Ubunu VM, accessed via PuTTY, where, by poor oversight or laziness, passwords could easily be deduced.
We used the terminal all the time, our VMs were minimal (and evey Linux nerd uses the terminal)
This it came to pass; once I had figured this psssword system out, and also that the terminal we used (bizarrely) could have a background image… I installed a background of your standard pink unicorn farting rainbows onto the terminal of my colleague.
And set the text colour to a very similar pink.
He immediately knew it was me, but it took him quite a while to discover how to change it all back to white text on black.
I recall a game and/or a gaming website that had a button entitled ‘the boss is coming!’ or something similar. Clicking that button would bring up a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet.
Back in the office days I used to swap the phone handsets over on adjoining desks - the handsets only, not the bases. So when the phone rang they would pick up and just get a dial tone. Invariably hang up and grab the other phone by which time they’d hung up on the caller.
Oh god, I remember that, which is weird because I’m so totally not a gamer. Or it was a different game with the same idea, perhaps; but fake Excel-like screen came up with a half-finished progress bar that said something like “Evaluating Workplace Priorities…” which I found amusing.
It’s almost certainly true to say that Tetris has this feature, because there have been approximately 863,492 implementations of Tetris in history, and I’m sure that some of them did.
There were quite a few official releases of Tetris, but Tetris may be one of the least cloned games in history, because the Tetris Company seems to be very diligent about tracking down clones and getting them taken down. I wrote a clone once but when I looked into publishing it, the information I found about the Tetris Company convinced me not to bother.
