[Bloomy22]

This has reminded me of an anecdote. I work on a corporate social network. One day a colleague from the parent company comes to us scared because instead of seeing the people photos and the attached images, he saw strange images. As in the past we had some scare with xss reflected, we immediately got scared and went straight to investigate the matter. It turned out that the colleague had a Firefox extension installed that changed his images for Nicholas Cage's faces. He didn't remember having done it, but we did remember his blunder hahaha

[ltr_]

I remember one of the students in our school replaced the Windows 95 startup logo with the goatse.cx picture of every computer of a new lab, the rector of the moment called an emergency gathering in the gym BEGGING the students to change it back . promising that there would be no repercussions, he was sweating blood, because authorities picked our school to inaugurate the computer national program that made the lab possible, the next day. nobody talked, they had to change the inauguration to another school, fun times.

[iamthejuan]

It is the logo.sys which is actually a bitmap file if I remember it correctly.

[fooker]

Here's anecdote from Google's glory days! We had a similar extension, with Larry Page instead of Nicholas Cage. And anyone leaving their computer unlocked were subject do it.

This became widespread enough to be mentioned at the new employee orientation.

[mocamoca]

At university, we used this extension to teach our classmates about good security practices, such as locking their computers when left unattended. It was fun, especially when professors didn't lock their computers. And my former classmates did learn to lock their computers :)

[pjerem]

A pretty good one is https://fakeupdate.net

I once pranked a coworker/friend with a Windows installation screen after lunch break. He was … astounded. The thing is, we were all using Debian in this company.

[iterateoften]

violating security policies in order to “teach a lesson” is a sure fire way to get people to lose trust in you.

Accessing someone’s computer and manipulating the software was instant termination at my old company. Some new security guy joined and tried to do what you did. Find unlocked computers and mess with them to prove a point. He lasted a week.

[veunes]

Some IT departments spend years trying to drill "Lock your computer!" into people’s heads yet you need just really simple solution!

[SketchySeaBeast]

We used to set the desktop wallpaper to David Hasselhoff.

[greazy]

That's hilarious. Sounds like someone was pranking your colleague.

Was this the extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/niccage/

[sam_bristow]

Damn, I was half hoping it was doing some deepfake face swapping rather than just totally replacing the whole image. Part of me would love to install a "Being John Malkovich" style face replacement plugin onto someone's machine.

[Bloomy22]

Yes, it was that one!

[InsideOutSanta]

At a company selling a B2B platform, we had an internal extension used to teach how to write extensions that drew an interactive pet on screen, similar to the one in this VS Code extension. It accidentally got deployed to one client, which caused a complete company shutdown because lots of people suddenly reported being hit by a virus to their internal IT team, causing company-wide panic.

I'm not sure what the lesson here is.

[DontchaKnowit]

At my company this happened once across all our internal tools. It was a joke inside one department that accidentally got pushed comapny wide

[taikon]

https://github.com/giusgad/pets.nvim

[veunes]

I love that kind of tech workplace comedy

[nunez]

Stuff of legends.