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

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.

Create a folder with intriguing name on desktop, take screenshot, set screenshot as wallpaper, delete folder. (Didn’t everyone?)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Highschool had filters to prevent students from visiting certain (most) sites, but for some reason a browser created using Visual Basic Studio’s browser template worked just fine. At least I think that’s what it was called. It’s been a minute.

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.

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 to freak people out.

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…

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.