Comment by iterateoften

There is a time and place for everything—and you should not assume a business environment is the only possible setting in which colleagues might pass by unattended workstations.

Ideally the prank is pulled in a high-trust, low-stakes environment like a college campus or high school computer lab, before corporate policies are part of one's life.

It is also a rich tradition, from the days of yore, before robust security practices became standard:

• http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/baggy-pantsing.html

• http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/derf.html

• https://www.multicians.org/cookie.html

I would much rather my colleagues be taught this lesson (even if just through a verbal reprimand) than work with someone who is allowed to remain ignorant of the risks of their behaviour.

It depends on the company and probably even the team. At least when I was running an IT team I generally viewed a colleague doing something like this as more effective than me nagging some sysadmin about them leaving their computer unlocked. Would have never tolerated someone on my team doing it to someone outside the team though.

It all depends on the company of course.

I worked at a place where if you left your laptop unlocked, anyone could use your slack account to announce you were buying breakfast for the team tomorrow. That was more effective than any training video they could have made us watch. But I obviously wouldn't do something like that as a lone wolf.

I’m of two minds about it. I agree that these days it’s by far the safer choice to steer clear of such antics.

But I do sort of miss the days when we had a little more fun with computers even at work. Twenty years ago it was pretty ubiquitous to get a goofy desktop background if you left your machine unsecured all the time and I never saw any harm come from it.

Times change I suppose.

What a sad company you worked for

It sounds like this guy came out on top in this, he found out really quickly that he joined a shit company.

> 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.

That's a very strange policy to apply to your security team. They have good reason to make a point about leaving your workstation unsecured.

Working for NCC Group, the expectation was that if you left your computer unsecured, something would happen to it, and you, not the person who followed office policy by highlighting your mistake, would look bad.

Ironic, given that a ton of the security dogma these days is "don't trust anyone" --- you can guess why that started happening; precisely because of people like him.

At Amazon there was a "unicorn game". If you find an unlocked computer, you could send "I love Unicorns" message using the credentials of the logged on person.

There was even an internal site with the unicorn image.

Yeah I lean on this side - avoid doing pranks and other practical jokes.

When there is any actual malware or security incident, you don't want your colleagues to think of you and go "Maybe this is just Dave pulling one of his clever pranks".