Create a folder with intriguing name on desktop, take screenshot, set screenshot as wallpaper, delete folder. (Didn’t everyone?)

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.

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.

Take all the balls out of the mice

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”.

The school computer were running Windows Vista, poor things didn’t need to be messed with.

Take a screen shot of the desktop. Set that screen shot as the desktop background and delete some of the icons/shortcuts.

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.

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)

Plugged one ethernet outlet to another on accident. But they were wired to the same dumb switch. So essentially I connected two switch ports together. This took the school network down for 4 days 😂

Somebody had put the Halo CE demo in some gym teacher’s shared folder and everybody in the school could access it and play LAN blood gulch

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.