Asklemmy

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.

Nice try, FBI guy. We are not divulging any of our past felonies.

Edit: oh boy, was I wrong...

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.

I found a blue screen of death screensaver online and I installed it on all the school library computers back my my freshman year.

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.

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. :)

Figured out how to install a ton of games on school laptops. School was pissed that I was running a Minecraft server

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

We sent the shutdown command to each others. Next computer class, the command was disabled.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Make a forkbomb on classmates computers and run it.

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

ITT: people admitting to violations of 18 USC 1030, which is a terrible law that is way too vague.

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.

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 :)

SubSeven

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

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

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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. .

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