[jimt1234]

I was working a tech conference, probably around 2001, with about a hundred PCs networked together. A colleague of mine intended to send a simple "net send" message to only my workstation, just as a joke. He messed up the syntax and the popup appeared on every PC in the conference, including the giant screen in the main conference hall. The message: "Fuck you". He was fired the next day.

(Don't feel bad for the guy. Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was a weekend "action photographer" [surf/skate/snowboard/...] who decided to go full-time after losing his job. He rode the early-2000s "extreme sports" wave and ended up being quite successful, and more importantly, much happier.)

[msla]

https://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard

> Long before FreeBSD, Jordan K. Hubbard earned a spot in Internet history in 1987 when he accidentally attempted to broadcast an rwall message to every machine on the Internet. He stopped it once he realized what was happening, but not before he & the other UC Berkeley network administrators were flooded with complaints.

[smoldesu]

Got in trouble for something similar in middle school, actually. I would bike over to the high school for my robotics club, and some of the older members had written a privilege escalation script for the Windows machines. So, I brought it on a flash drive to my technology class the next day and ran 'shutdown -i' with admin privs. Being young and stupid, I broadcast a reboot message to all ~700 machines connected on the network, and got a fairly thorough talking-to...

[ilyt]

I played with network sniffer on home network (that sent funny packets to switch to make it MITM traffic thru my machine). Except it didn't work/I fucked something up and all traffic went thru my machine.

They couldn't prove it's me so teacher just blanked banned anyone in the library (our class with few of my friends were on the 4 machines in the library) from using machines there for few months.

Then when we got new shiny machines for computer lab I was bored when the teacher was explaining something so I started guessing admin password. It was zaqwsx

[azinman2]

When I was studying abroad, I noticed that the Ethernet at my Uni dorm seemed to have a lot of cross traffic. So I ran a simple password sniffer, not knowing it also effectively turned my computer into a giant switch. Soon after I came home to my flat mates saying “the IT department came and kicked you off the internet.” I thought it was a joke, until I saw I wasn’t on. I called and pled dumb, saying I had installed an “internet accelerator” and they believed me and restored access.

FWIW I wasn’t actually going to do anything with the passwords (of which I accumulated many!). It was mostly just a fun nerd flex with no bad intentions.

[bluesign]

Similar story; bet with a friend to hack and change his password at university. Accidentally changing all user passwords to some profanity including his name, luckily didn’t get caught.

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

I did the exact same thing in a freshman engineering course although the wording of my message was slightly different. My message wound up being displayed on the classroom projector. The Professor (former marine) dispatched the TAs to find the computer it came from. Each computer in the classroom was clearly labelled with an ID so it did not take them long.

[causality0]

I did the same in middle school. Thankfully my message was just the letter q and not something offensive.

[HeckFeck]

I mean, if I did the same and lost my job, I'd still say "worth it". I'd still be holding back the sniggers despite the vociferous verbiage flying my way.