What's the best or nerdiest prank you have ever pulled?

I may or may not be looking for ideas to get my husband back for some annoying software he installed on our network...

Comments

[Gergely Polonkai]

I’m not sure if it counts as a prank, but here it goes.

I worked at a company where workstation security was taken very seriously: if you left your machine unattended unlocked, especially when we had visitors in the building, you were up for a warning and too many warnings could lead to being fired.

To protect each other’s hiney whenever we saw an unattended workstation we opened up the mail client, entered the address of up to 4 colleagues and the subject “free beer tonight?”. Then sent it and locked the machine.

The unspoken rule for attackers was to put your own address first, and for victims to actually buy some kind of beverage for at least the attacker within a week. There were some notorious non-lockers, even after falling victim many times.

[Molly Struve (she/her)]

I LOVE THAT!!!!

[Causing a Ruckus]

Easiest prank was to plug a usb mouse into the back of the PC one desk over, but route it under the desk to the floor of your cubicle. You then nudge it with your foot randomly throughout the day while your co-worker loses it.

[Causing a Ruckus]

In the days before caller-ID, we found a co-worker's home phone number. We called it, and timed how long until the end of the voicemail greeting/beep. Using that timing as a guide, we'd call his home number while he was at work, then as it got to the end of the greeting we forwarded the call to him at his desk. We did this all day long. When he got home and checked his messages, 21 of them were of him answering his work phone in a progressively angrier manner.

[craftyhydra]

Best solo prank,replacing spoons with galium ones.

Best group prank...oh boy.

Tricking a friend to going to the store with a guy in on while his laptop is on.

We now have around 10 minutes alone time.

1. We change all his windows bars to garnish colours.

2. We open his browser, find I his history his taste in... certain films from a certain "hub" if you may.

3. We had his browser open up a different one of these in multiple tabs. (He didn't know he couldn't close them)

however this was all distraction from the actual plan.

1. Use windows task scheduler to make a message appear, so whenever he started his laptop it created o popup that he had been banned from the university wifi for explicit usage.

He finds all the other stuff, ha ha funny guys changes it back, but no popup... we are confused.

We go to classes.

We realise that we not ticked the on ac power option.

So we trick him into resetting his laptop and plugging it in.

Laptop comes on, he looks at the popup, stands up hands on head, I've been banned off the uni wifi for porn!

He then shows his laptop to the professor giving the PowerPoint, who looks bewildered.

He then googles the fake error code, repeatedly on the same machine still not catching kn6. This goes on for at least an hour before we tell him.

[fluffy]

In the computer science lab in college I wrote a program that would randomly eject the CD-ROM drive, then after a few minutes it would start to immediately open the drive after it closed, then after a few more minutes of that it would spam the drive with "open" commands, essentially locking it open.

I also wrote a little thing that would subtly mess with mouse motion, like it would add inertia (and would bounce off the sides of the screen like air hockey) or it would rotate the direction of travel a bit or whatever. These effects would randomly change and grow over time.

Both of these were quite easy to do since the Linux machines' security was very weak; no xauth by default (so it was trivial to attach random X clients - including keyloggers!), and the CD-ROM drives would just respond to anyone who was logged in since the permissions were set 777.

[Aswath KNM]

I created a shutdown script and put it on autostart in windows OS(I forgot its name though. It runs automatically when system starts) and everytime they turn on the system, it automatically shuts down for no reason.

No one could figure out why!!!

So they had to format the whole hard drive. I don't remember why I did it though!!

[Thomas H Jones II]

A really effective prank is setting the init-default to 0.

I did that to an annoying co-worker back in the early 2000s. They ended up calling out the hardware vendor to come fix their workstation. Obviously, since it was an OS-level setting, when the FE replaced the "faulty" power module, it didn't fix the problem. It apparently occurred to neither of them that there might be a problem with the OS (in defense of the FE, he was just a hardware-monkey; but the workstation owner was an SA and should have thought to boot off of media so he could mount the boot drive and examine the logs), so, the FE ended up replacing the entire workstation.

On the plus side, because our employer had a platinum service contract, the dispatch of the FE and the replacement of the workstation was essentially "free".

[pthreat]

null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/u...

[Matt Eland]

I worked for a now-dead company that liked to prefix their product names with life|. It was part of the branding and it became a bit of a gag internally with the dev team - to the point of us calling the clock module life|time.

This spawned a joke when one of my colleagues left his PC unlocked. I went into his Windows time zone localization settings and I customized the AM/PM string to be |time instead of AM or PM.

In effect, this made his task bar read 11:09 |time for example. Things like windows explorer also reflected this.

This, however, is not where he found the issue.

The clock module in our software was a very faint watermark on the back of the main screen of our multimedia application. He launches the application locally and it says 11:09 |time in giant lettering.

He immediately suspects that someone has modified the application code on his local machine and starts looking through the time module line-by-line. Didn't look for differences in version control or see if other coworkers had the same problem. We finally had to stop him and explain it so he wouldn't burn a bunch of time trying to debug a Windows feature he didn't know about.

[Drew Knab]

alias nano='vim' on our UAT server.

I got an email from my former Supervisor two months after I left the company.

[Wernich ️]

a guy i worked with brought in a musical card that played "she's got the look", which it started playing at the "nananana na" bit. because we were in the time&attendance industry, we had tons of equipment that as used for testing. we took the card apart and hooked it onto the siren output on one of test units. i set up teamviewer on the machine that ran the controlling software for the hardware and we ran a long cable to one of the other guys' desk and hid this little speaker inside an enormous test rig behind him.

every now and then, we would log into the pc and play "she's got the look" for only about 3 or 4 seconds. we'd play it once a day and sometimes not play it for days or even over a month. eventually everyone in the company knew about it, even our technical director, but nobody spoke about it, even after hearing it being played.

to make it worse, because we had teamviewer, we could play this from anywhere, so it couldn't have been me or the other guy in my office, because we had already left for the day, or gone for coffee. after about a year and a bit we moved to new offices, so the setup was moved to the ceiling of the new place, right above where this guy sat. i eventually got a new job and left, but the people that were still there kept up with it. in total this went on for almost two years before he found the speaker.

man, it was fun watching him go through his drawers, look under his desk, inside his pc, etc trying to find where the music was coming from. i think he hates that song now. :D

[arjuniyer1978]

It was back in 1999, our webdev team alone had internet access and proxy password was confidentially kept within their team.

We(desktop application development team) built a small application, sent it over on email through testing team, when they opened it, it prompted for the proxy authentication, looking exactly like the proxy window, after accepting password, it would write it the shared network...we waited for 5 hrs first day after mails went to the entire group, finally someone entered it and we got it!
This was very successful after every password change, We didn't tell them how we kept getting credentials, kept blaming that we have contacts...:)

[Ben Halpern]

Install a script-running browser extension and then write some JavaScript!

[pthreat]

Back in the day when sms was all the rage, companies would have an sms web platform without captcha. I made a script to generate random numbers with the number prefix of the city I lived in back then, then I would also generate random messages with random names. Messages would basically state that I was their buddy and that they should add me to msn. I overflowed the msn capacity back in the day which was around 2000 contacts if I remember correctly. Then Id take random people and made them participate in random conversations. This was really funny.

[pthreat]

We had an asshole project manager that always said yes to every feature the customer requested without consulting with the dev team. I kindly replaced all "no" for "yes" in the messaging platform with a mitm attack