Asklemmy

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.

IT removed games. I put them back in, but renamed the games, as well as the folder that they were hidden in. Then told people that I was sworn to secrecy BUT, and how to get into the games. I knew that I won when I caught a couple instructors playing it.

Does writing an infinitely looping stream of 1s and 0s program on my math teachers ti-84 count?

She didnt know how to stop the program so she took the batteries out

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.

I graduated in 2000. During my 11th year, I had an economics class in the same room as a computer lab. Over the course of a few weeks, I downloaded a voice synthesizer program, Shit Talker, to all the computers and set up scripts to have them all begin "talking shit" about our educationally worthless instructor (he taught because he wanted to coach sports), all sequentially during a class a few weeks in the future.

What I didn't think about is how I was one of maybe four or five computer literate students in my grade, so I was quickly targeted after it went off. I should have just denied having done it but I was a dumb teen; they were bluffing about knowing it was me and I fell for it. I had computer access revoked for the rest of my public school career.

Soooo...a bit later that year, my father brings home a very small, defunct computer from his work. It was this custom job consisting of a tiny motherboard, smaller than a micro ATX, with a couple of daughter boards for all its peripheral connections. He just stole it because he thought it was cool but, being pretty computer illiterate, didn't know what to do with it. I gutted it, installed the innards in a plastic file folder box, and installed Windows 98. I now had a portable computer! I'd carry it to my classes, hook it up to a monitor, and use that instead. I initially caught flak for it but I was restricted from using school computers, not their monitors.

My school had a shared drive where anyone could create files and folders. There was one folder where people would put random things (bash scripts downloaded from the internet, pirated minecraft, etc.). I wrote a python program that would display a picture of a pineapple on your screen (no ability to minimise, or move other windows in front of it). I had python installed to one of those folders that only appears if you select "show protected operating system files". I later wrote a remote-control script that communicated by creating files on the network. I was able to control the mouse and keyboards, open applications, take screenshots, and monitor keypresses (I never got anyone to click on it without me telling them to though). Never got discovered for any of it...

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Edit: oh boy, was I wrong...

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

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.

Booted Macs into single-user mode and set a root password, then logging in with ssh from across the room and killing stuff that other people were running.

Had a class that was just taking old computer parts and building working systems. Installed SubSeven on some classmates’ systems and did shenanigans. Came in handy while we played Starsiege Tribes.

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.

SubSeven

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

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.

So many comments are about such major things, where as at most I only really put ThePowderToy into the shared drive for student accounts in my junior year of highschool and once in my freshman year made a simple batch program that all it did was constantly open up command prompts but didn't do anything harmful.

Y'all did so much more interesting and worse things than I did, I swear

I remember dialing into the college network during the summer to access Usenet and play muds. It was some kind unsecured number, I forget how I found it

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.

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.

We could unscrew the chassis of the computer and take whatever hardware we wanted to lol. We never actually got anything but we'd remove the RAM or unplug a hard drive and put it back.

We also found games hidden in certain directories. I even saw someone playing Undertale.

I also found a torrent client running on start up on one of the desktops seeding some movies.

If it counts, we used a program to throttle other devices' WiFi speeds. I forgot what it was called.

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

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.

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

Replaced one teacher's desktop background with a screenshot of the desktop, then hid all the icons and minimized the taskbar.

Got admin access on one of the lab computers to install something needed for a class, and swapped out a bunch of the default Windows sound effects (login etc) with random other sound clips.

Torrented Flatout 2 onto one of the library computers and found out years later a bunch of kids were still playing it during lunch/recess

Make a forkbomb on classmates computers and run it.

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

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.

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.