The Ethical Hacker Network - Stupid user tricks

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Andrew Waite

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Stupid user tricks

« on: June 16, 2008, 04:20:41 PM »

Hi All,

Cracking article from InfoWorld with 10 stupid user stories. Not all security related but all good for a laugh.

I had tried to pick my favourite, but that changed with every story I read.

See what you think, and if you can beat them feel free to share Wink


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jason

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Re: Stupid user tricks

« Reply #1 on: June 25, 2008, 06:31:04 PM »

I worked for MCI, once upon a time, in the same building as one of their big call centers. In the call center, each major area had a giant display over it that showed the stats for that group, fed from a machine in the area.

One day one of the managers decides that he needs to do a bit of surfing and chooses the machine running the display for his area to do so. Very shortly after, he was frogmarched to the door, but they did stop long enough to get his porn off of the display.


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g00d_4sh

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Re: Stupid user tricks

« Reply #2 on: June 25, 2008, 07:20:38 PM »

Nice... I heard about a Vice pres of a company who was doing a meeting with two women.... and happened to have his screen visible behind him, with a rather 'revealing' screen saver going. That was a good story too.


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jason

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Re: Stupid user tricks

« Reply #3 on: June 25, 2008, 08:38:45 PM »

Another one, not nearly on the same scale of badness but still funny, was from when I was doing desktop support for a financial organization. We got a frantic call from one of the users that they were trying to do a quarterly close of their books and one of their machines wouldn't boot. I went down to take a look and the machine was showing POST error for the keyboard. I looked down at the keyboard and there was a hunk of pretzel jammed between a couple of the keys that was holding one of them down. I pulled out my multitool and flicked the offending foodstuff out of the keyboard and viola! the machine booted. The user was totally mortified.


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g00d_4sh

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Re: Stupid user tricks

« Reply #4 on: June 25, 2008, 08:49:30 PM »

Heh.... I had a user in my office come running to my desk a while back. She said her computer wouldn't turn on... it just kept beeping at her. I asked her what sorts of beeps... she said very quick beeps. I thought about it for a minute, and thought I must be mistaken in my assumption. Sure enough when I got to her desk... and saw her bookbag thrown ontop of the keyboard... I knew what the problem was though. Same thing you came accross, but it was a bag instead of food. She was equally mortified. I told her not to worry, it was just a PEBKAC problem, and I see lots of those. At which point she asked what PEBKAC was... when I explained it, she wished I had not. None the less, I got a laugh.