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.

Take all the balls out of the mice

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.