[realusername]

I remember a similar thing with the Novell login at school on Windows XP.

If you just unplugged the ethernet cable at the right time, you would login straight away and even with a higher permission account compared to a normal login.

Nobody really cared about computer security back then.

[joshuaissac]

At my school, you would get different levels of permissions depending on when you unplugged the cable and plugged it back in. Unplug it too early, and you get kicked out of the session. Too late and all the restrictions get applied. In the middle were two sweet spots, one that disabled the Internet filter and another that allowed running arbitrary applications instead of just the ones from the whitelist.

Once the other students found out about this, there were many damaged Ethernet ports as they yanked the cables out of the ports violently. The school administrators eventually fixed the Internet filter vulnerability but the application one remained because not many people cared about it.