Who, Me? Welcome to another installment of Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday column in which you confess to crises you caused, and the course corrections that cured the chaos.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Curt" who once worked as IT security manager at a company where the helpdesk manager routinely ignored company policy by not logging out of his PC. The machine sat there ready for use, instead of reverting to a password-protected screensaver that could only be dispelled by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to spawn a login dialog.
That behavior caught the eye of some community college students the company allowed to work on the helpdesk for unpaid work experience. As Curt tells it, the students could not resist temptation and took a screenshot of the helpdesk manager's desktop. They then tweaked the screensaver to show that static screenshot.
After about a week of this, the helpdesk manager angrily asked for his PC to be re-imaged, because it was occasionally locking up. His mouse wouldn't work and only a hard reboot got it working again.
Curt was in on the students' joke and had promised to cover for them in case of strife.
So as the helpdesk manager raged, he couldn't help but laugh.
"Maybe someone changed your screensaver to a picture of your desktop. Did you try pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to see if the login box appears?" Curt asked.
The helpdesk manager stared at Curt, turned on his heel, and went into his office. A few seconds later, expletives colored the air and the helpdesk manager emerged to complain the prank had cost him valuable time.
Curt was having none of it.
"I said: 'It wasn't me or anyone in my group and I do not know who did it. But I'll bet it was a lot more time than locking and unlocking your PC would have taken.'"
Which made Curt's point, and thankfully it went down well because the helpdesk manager was a decent chap and admitted it was a great prank.
One loose end remained: how had the students come up with the prank?
"They told me about one of the company's engineers who would ask for remote assistance," Curt explained. When the students logged in to help, they saw a desktop covered in icons for games, Tor, illicit peer-to-peer file sharing programs, and more stuff that company policy prohibited.
That desktop was just wallpaper that the engineer thought was a great jape. And it was, because it set the students thinking about how they could use the same technique themselves.
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Source: The register