I Rick Rolled my entire school this way. Write a program that maxed the volume and held it there at 100%, minimised all open windows, downloaded a photo of Rick Astley and set it as your wallpaper, then started playing Never Gonna Give You Up. The only way to stop it was to power off the computer or wait the song out, then manually fix your wallpaper.
I saved the executable in a publically accessible location on the school’s server that I shouldn’t have had write access to, and sent a cleverly disguised link to a mate. He thought it was hilarious, and forwarded the email to a dozen of his mates. They forwarded it to all their mates, and pretty soon no teacher could go 60 seconds without another one of their students’ laptops interrupting the class at max volume.
Best bit? I “taught a valuable lesson in cybersecurity” and didn’t get in (much) trouble!!
I’m still irritated about when I was a youth I found a somewhat obvious security hole, and took advantage of it in a mildly funny way, the staff just punished me.
You weren’t supposed to be able to change the desktop background, but for some reason MS Paint had a “set to background” option that worked. So I set the background to a screenshot of the desktop, and then hid all the icons and start menu. Later, the teacher thought the computer was broken because “nothing was working”.
I think it could’ve been a good teaching moment. A talk about not messing shared resources up, and channel my interests somewhere productive. Nope. Just a lecture and week long library ban. Disappointed.
I Rick Rolled my entire school this way. Write a program that maxed the volume and held it there at 100%, minimised all open windows, downloaded a photo of Rick Astley and set it as your wallpaper, then started playing Never Gonna Give You Up. The only way to stop it was to power off the computer or wait the song out, then manually fix your wallpaper.
I saved the executable in a publically accessible location on the school’s server that I shouldn’t have had write access to, and sent a cleverly disguised link to a mate. He thought it was hilarious, and forwarded the email to a dozen of his mates. They forwarded it to all their mates, and pretty soon no teacher could go 60 seconds without another one of their students’ laptops interrupting the class at max volume.
Best bit? I “taught a valuable lesson in cybersecurity” and didn’t get in (much) trouble!!
I’m still irritated about when I was a youth I found a somewhat obvious security hole, and took advantage of it in a mildly funny way, the staff just punished me.
You weren’t supposed to be able to change the desktop background, but for some reason MS Paint had a “set to background” option that worked. So I set the background to a screenshot of the desktop, and then hid all the icons and start menu. Later, the teacher thought the computer was broken because “nothing was working”.
I think it could’ve been a good teaching moment. A talk about not messing shared resources up, and channel my interests somewhere productive. Nope. Just a lecture and week long library ban. Disappointed.