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Ask YC: Prank Hacking

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11–20 of 35 posts

Re: Ask YC: Prank Hacking

#11
My favorite low-cost easy-peasy make-'em-feel-stupid prank: take a screen capture of their desktop (without any windows open) and set the screen cap as the desktop background. Next, delete/hide (depending how nasty you want to go) all their desktop icons. If the taskbar is always visible, hide it too, or even better, resize it to zero pixels.

Step away from computer and find a nice vantage point to watch them click and scream at their non-responding computer.

Works a treat.

Re: Ask YC: Prank Hacking

#12

My favorite low-cost easy-peasy make-'em-feel-stupid prank: take a screen capture of their desktop (without any windows open) and set the screen cap as the desktop background. Next, delete/hide (depending how nasty you want to go) all their desktop icons. If the taskbar is always visible, hide it too, or even better, resize it to zero pixels. Step away from computer and find a nice vantage point to watch them click a…

A friend of mine used to have a screenshot of winamp as his desktop. No matter how many times I used that computer to play music I'd always start by clicking on the fake winamp :p

Re: Ask YC: Prank Hacking

#13
post #4

Air Conditioning ducts, particularly of those with Central Air. Get some catfish bait, a few pounds of shrimp, fart bombs, or even a few dead squirrels - all of these worked well for me in High School. Squirrels are probably by far the best and I recommend combining them with another form of attack. Place a few pounds of shrimp in one location and throw some frozen squirrels elsewhere. About the time the shrimp smell…

yuck!

Re: Ask YC: Prank Hacking

#14
A fellow sysadmin that I used to work with did a brilliant job of pranking me by quietly changing my ksh ENV variable to another file, and then aliasing a handful of commands (like su) to some brilliant ascii art taunts. As an added bonus, if I didn't clean the mess up in a specific order, then it attempted to repair any missing bits of itself.

I didn't know about the ENV variable at the time, so it took me a few minutes to puzzle out. I cheated with a carefully crafted find command.

We used Mac workstations in that office. The Mac OS has a sort-of vulnerability where, if you can get admin access to it, you can create an invisible administrator account on the machine with ssh privileges. I always wanted to do that, and then modify the su command on our server to watch for his username, ssh back to his machine, and play the "Oh my god, they gave you ROOT?!" clip from Jeffrey Hitchins' "Tech Support".

Re: Ask YC: Prank Hacking

#16
Pranks are always tough, these aren't getting vindictive are they? If they are out to have fun, try photoshopping him into riske photos, tape/superglue his cubicle/something down, prank call him (impersonate some offical)...do something that gets his blood running that isn't permanent.

Re: Ask YC: Prank Hacking

#18
If they use a Windows computer, type the command Ctrl+Alt+DownArrow. It turns their screen upside-down. The other arrows work as well to turn the screen sideways. Not sure how familiar most people are with this though. I've always wanted to try it on someone and see how they reacted.

Re: Ask YC: Prank Hacking

#20

My favorite low-cost easy-peasy make-'em-feel-stupid prank: take a screen capture of their desktop (without any windows open) and set the screen cap as the desktop background. Next, delete/hide (depending how nasty you want to go) all their desktop icons. If the taskbar is always visible, hide it too, or even better, resize it to zero pixels. Step away from computer and find a nice vantage point to watch them click a…

I pulled that on several CS majors back in my college days. Works every time.
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