How did you mess with school computers?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Set up a Minecraft server back when you could run the Java files off of a USB. ran for a while, nothing fancy.

I also renamed every calculator icon to "cockulator". Boy oh boy did I think that was funny back then. (it's still a little funny)

Situation: once in middle school, we had to present something for a class (don’t remember which one) with power point slides

In those days, you had to bring the presentation in an usb pendrive.

For some reason, most of the class didn’t finish it.

I disabled usb ports from device manager.

Saved the day.

Take a screen shot of the desktop. Set that screen shot as the desktop background and delete some of the icons/shortcuts.

My school had a web filter to block YouTube and various other sites that they didn't want students to go to. On the block page, there was a "report site blocked incorrectly" button, as well as a password override for admins to do a one time bypass.

One of my classmates registered a domain that all it did was log the IP address of whoever visited it. He then attempted to visit the site from class, it was blocked, and he clicked the report button. Later on one of the IT admins reviewed the report to see if the site should be unblocked or not, by visiting the site. My classmate then had the public IP address of the IT admin.

This IT admin must not have been very good, because he had a password unprotected, open, telnet port pointing to his computer. So we were able to telnet into his PC and poke around. He had an Excel file on his desktop with the web filter override passwords for every school in the district. That Excel file was promptly shared to as many people as who asked for it and we thought wouldn't rat us out.

We gloriously had unrestricted Internet for several months before the teachers caught on. We were told that anyone who used this password would be found out, and that the school was going to have a "volunteer" community service day for 4 hours on Saturday, picking up trash around the school. Anyone who attended would be pardoned for using the password, anyone who didn't attend and who was found out for using the password would have been "punished" (very ambiguously defined). I did not go to the volunteer day, nor was I punished in any way. I do think that it was just a bluff and they didn't have good enough logging to tell who actually used the password.

I believed that I was being unfairly marked with a biased grading.

I got access to admin privileges, found another students essay from the same class but different timeslot, knowing what grade they got after handing it in early, I changed nothing but the font and name and handed it in to get a full letter grade less than the original student had.

I couldn't keep myself from complaining about it and was suspended over it, but it was a privilege when I knew I was right.

Edit: To clarify, it was the same teacher for both class groups.

Plugged one ethernet outlet to another on accident. But they were wired to the same dumb switch. So essentially I connected two switch ports together. This took the school network down for 4 days 😂

I worked IT in a high school for about 10 years. Here are some of the doozies:

• weed stashed in a PC case
• pop tart jammed into a DVD drive
• illicit domain admin account created by a student worker
• script to set porn to be the default background on reboot.

We all had laptops in highschool, and apparently our IT admin couldn't figure out how to disable the "Upgrade to windows 10 for free!" Popup everyone was getting. Anyone that upgraded to windows 10 got called down to IT had their laptop reimaged. When I heard about it, I figured that they must have been checking OS by our user agent or some other web-based method, as upgrading to windows 10 appeared to kill all of the group policy things. Assuming they had everyone's mac address recorded, you could correlate laptop to user pretty easily.

From then on, every week I would USB boot a different OS. Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 10, Windows XP, etc. I would run each OS for a few days until I got called down to IT, had my laptop inspected, and sent back to class when everything checked out. Drove them nuts, I thought it was funny.

We had these old ass everex (I think that was the brand) 386's that had an one line 8 character display on the front that would display what drive was being accessed and what sector/track it was on. It was pretty useless, until we found the memory address that held the buffer (80h if I remember correctly. We were dumb so we wrote a TSR in turbo pascal that are random times would scroll something like "this computer is about to blow up in 5...4...3...2...1...BOOM!".

I don't think anyone really cared as it was the secondary computer lab used by the programming club mainly, but we thought we were really bad ass.

I had some hands-on computer repair training at a private school once. One old machine wouldn't boot, complaining that it couldn't find the keyboard which was plugged into it. I unplugged it while the computer was on. At the time, unplugging a keyboard while the computer was on was... not a good thing. There was a little curl of smoke, a scorch mark on the motherboard, and a sustained tone from the chassis and that computer breathed its last.

Later, in college, I used the "net send" command on random people in open labs just to watch how confused they got.

One day, after school, I decided to tinker with the Mac systems at my school, and in that process I learned that Mac has a virtual drive that it uses as a setup medium that it doesn't clear, it just un-mounts, when you finish installing. So I just re-mounted the setup drive on the computer from the command line, restarted, booted in like I was setting up a fresh new computer and gave myself an admin account on one of the computers in our lab. Didn't really do anything nefarious with it, but it was a fun little experiment regardless

I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

So somebody would "start the browser" and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a "hacked version" of firefox..

Set the wallpaper to a screenshot of the desktop then hid the desktop icons and set the taskbar to auto hide bar. If we had access to the cursor settings, we’d set the default cursor to the hourglass icon too

One my friends in high school was in the student sysadmin class. He snuck Call of Duty into the schools default image so literally every single computer in the school came with CoD1 preinstalled. We would have massive servers running during lunch and study hall and other break times. It was awesome

Don't know if it's called messing with it but installed GTA and pretty much played that any chance I got. Also learnt that "sound" is just an additional aspect of a game I can get by without

I replaced one of the DLLs (winmm.dll?) with a DLL of my own. It got loaded before the login dialog and installed a hook that saved your login details to a file. This was Windows for Workgroups so no access controls for files.

That way we managed to get the login info for a teacher that nobody liked, then we filled his home directory with porn. IIRC there was a quota of 5 MB and after that the admins got involved.

This was back in the 90s... we figured out a simple way to make 'empty' files using the spacebar ascii and qbasic. We'd have a simple interface, flashing cursor, and you'd type in a number; it would then create an 'empty' file of that many MB.

Of course being 14 yr old little shits, we wondered, how big can the file be? Someone created a file big enough that first it filled the student partition; then the teacher partition; then the temp partition; then the system partition, at which point the entire network slowed to a transfer speed of a couple of bytes. When we realised we could do this, it was happening several times a week.

After that, anyone caught with a blank screen and flashing cursor got in deep shit. They deleted the attrib command so we couldn't un-read-only / un-hidden things, but we just copied it from our own DOS at home and brought it in on a floppy drive

Modified every boot floppy disk to display „

<teacher name>

I still feel bad about that. Mr. E., if you are reading this, I‘m sorry, you were a great teacher and taught us well.

Gained access to the school's domain admin account and fucked with th teachers remotely via Tor.

Wanted to access the teachers calendar because he was a fucking Nazi and stumbled upon VPN credentials to a government-run education network and could've leaked hundreds of thousands of pupil's personal data and school grades but decided against it and shared with admins how I got in and told them how to fix it. Never got into his calendar though. 😶

When I was in high school, I reset the admin password on one of the macs in the computer lab in single user mode and used it to find the school’s Wi-Fi password in the keychain. Shared it with a few friends and it eventually made its way to most of the student body. It was a total game changer for all of us because we all had smartphones (this was in 2014ish) but the building had virtually no cell service indoors whatsoever.

Our school had a local TV station. They broadcast school board meetings and a slideshow of random updates about the township. I figured out how they controlled the music in the background and changed the music to heavy metal.

I came into class the next day and my TV production teacher told me that the school received multiple calls complaining about the music.

This was ~15 years ago. We got a laptop with school credentials on it, but couldn't log in to the local admin account, only our own student network accounts so couldn't do anything fun with it. No problem, install Linux on a flash drive, plug that in, run a script to crack the admin account (thanks rainbow tables) and get in. It was not a very strong password. A lot you can do now. Install games, browse the web unfiltered, and so on, but problem is our use of the laptop was limited to the after school activity we were part of (robotic club obviously) so still not really too much fun to be had unless we wanted to get caught pretty quickly. But there was one thing, we could grab the WiFi password. Turns out that it's only hidden on the student accounts, on the admin account you just click on the WiFi network and it just gives it to you. We didn't plan for it but we didn't take advantage of it. We shared that password to a couple friends but in general kept it under wraps, this was before data plans were so wide spread so it was actually useful, and the school itself was a faraday cage for anything but the weakest cell signal. Best part, it worked in other schools too, so I'm pretty sure it got spread pretty far eventually. I graduated before they changed it, no clue what happen after though.

We also took the balls out of the mice. And put tape on the optical ones.

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. :)

Not in school.

But i have written a .bat scipt in notepad on an unlocked laptop in a store

Then added the script into the startup folder.

The script would restart the pc after 30 seconds.

shutdown -r -t 30

(R for restart, t for time, 30 means 30 seconds) its harmless.. but also super frustrating

Write it in a notepad file. Save it as a .bat file

In college we had courses on Linux and we were able to SSH on other students' computers. First I used innocuous commands that ejected the optical drive or that enabled the screensaver.

But unfortunately it escalated quickly and soon every student would mess with each other by shutting down the computers...

My home room in middle school was one of the few classrooms that had windows pcs. They used deepfreeze to reset them daily, but I found some program that actually disabled it. I think I just installed firefox or chrome and then ran windows updates because they always had the annoying yellow shield system tray icon for windows updates needed.

We installed Duke Nukem 3D on every computer. It was like one exe file and we’d just drop it into random folders. Then we’d play in typing class and only switch back to typing when the teacher came by.

Wrote a TSR to beep the speaker gradually longer every time a key is pressed. The programming teacher assumed excessive beeping meant you were playing some sort of game. I'd run it on the PC I was using before class was over to get the next kid to sit there in trouble.

I wrote a program to repeatedly open and close the mechanical CD/DVD drive and put it in the startup folder.

Aside from the computer/s mentioned above, my school was an Apple school. I got around filters by ssh'ing into my homecomputer with XForwarding.

A friend of mine installed the Halo demo on the school computers.

In middle school our one class played this computer game that was similar to SimCity, but wasn't. I found out the save files could just be edited in plain text. So I cheated. I never was very good at SimCity.

Not messing with anything, but I was learning Python in HS and I went to python.com. At the time it was NOT about the programming language. And it wasn't blocked. That was a shock sitting in the school library.

Friends found a way to get our scheduling website to leak our schedules weeks early completely client-side. Because a lot of schools use that website, the information spread and all of a sudden we had people from Kentucky in our Discord server asking us how to do it. You're welcome, random Kentuckians.

Loaded quake on all the computers in a classroom. Which were conveniently arranged to make it impossible for a teacher to see all screens at once. And with no effort we were able to play multi-player matches basically every class. A substitute even joined in one time.

A group of us discovered the only range of non-firewalled IPs in our university, which belonged to a particular library building. And because this was Windows 95 and you could just change your IP to whatever you wanted, we could connect to Quakeworld with a ridiculously low ping.

Ok, I'm old and this wasn't a computer prank but it's along the same lines.

I used to have a digital watch that functioned as a small universal remote. (It looked like an 80's calculator watch with tiny numbers.)

You did have to program it with the universal code for that brand, but my middle school had bought their TVs in bulk, so the ones permanently mounted in the rooms were all identical models.

I simply programmed my watch to that model, and I'd occasionally keep turning the TV on during a lesson. I did it fairly infrequently, and always in different classes so as not to give myself away.

I never got caught. Back then Tvs only went to channel 100-120ish without special equipment for satellites. If they went higher I would have LOVED to keep changing it to channel 666.

Turned the screen upside down with the keyboard shortcut (whatever it is)

A friend of mine just opened up the Spanish teacher's tower while she was out of the room and stole her RAM. He was in IT and was the student assigned to try and fix it too, which was hilarious.

As a teacher: I would change the computer hooked up to the projector to Dvorak layout and forget to change it back.

Put some VB script (I think) that opened and closed the CD-ROM 50 times inside a startup folder. Did it on all computers. Also put a batch file there that shuts down the computer one second after logging in on all teacher computers.

And last but not least, I created a phishing Facebook page, opened it on some browsers in school, rewrote the URL to a Facebook one (without pressing enter) and left it there, collected some passwords.

Edit: Also installed Ubuntu (dual booted) on the computer I usually used.

Edit2: Disabled the tracking software for a computer I used. Damn, it's all coming back to me! Good times.