[Poll] Your most illegal / unethical project

First story

Not me, but my former adviser, then in India, told us this instructive story on the topic “why you need to check the code” (Note: it was 30 years ago)

Dude to the company: if you fire me, your system will stop working.

The company planned cuts, and the head of this project, in order to maintain its position, made the above threat to management. At first it worked, but then they decided to fire him, on Friday. And, of course, on Monday morning the system stopped working. They eagerly tried to fix the problem, but then decided to take it back. When he returned to work the following week, everything worked again.
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What was the trick?

He arranged that the system did a check on the fact that his employee badge was being held through a reader, and buried it in some kind of encrypted code that no one was worth viewing / understanding.

Is it illegal? Maybe. Unethical? Yeah. Great story? And then!

Nupul Kukreja, Senior Engineer at Credit Karma

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The translation was made with the support of the company EDISON Software , which is professionally engaged in software testing , content marketing and promotion , and a little integration of video surveillance systems .

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Second story

This code saved me a lot of money as a kid when I was sitting in an internet cafe.

“REG add HKCU \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ System / v DisableTaskMgr / t REG_DWORD / d 0 / f”

Now for the story.

Most Internet cafes in my country used the Cyber ​​client program to track the time you bought, and when the paid period expired, the session ended and the following appeared on the monitor:



These Internet cafes turned off the task manager because He allowed to remove programs.

And now that's what I did:

I bought, for example, 10 minutes

logged in on their computer

Enabled Task Manager using CMD and the above code.

Finally, I pushed “Ctrl + Alt + Delete”, opened the task manager, terminated the “Cyber ​​client” program and continued to sit on the Internet.

I have never been caught

Maduka Kalu, Studied Computer Programming at Google University

Third story

When I was in high school, I made a simple script that detected the installed version of Windows and copied a small batch file (batch file) into the appropriate startup folder, which simply contained “shutdown -f -s -t 0”, and turned off the computer. I also prepared the autorun.inf file that did this. All this was to create a CD with which I would play my friends: their computers were turned off when they just started it. Pretty harmless and easy to fix: you just need to boot into safe mode and delete the file from the boot folder.

I wrote all the files onto a floppy disk, intending to take it home, and write everything onto a disk, but just at that moment when I pulled out the floppy disk, the IT administrator noticed this and confiscated it.

A week later, they call me into the office of the director and say that I am removed from the computer class for writing a virus that apparently "spread throughout the network." Here is such a fucking brainless we had an admin.

But the computer science teacher was cool. During the parents' meeting, he asked this question and just told my mother that he highly appreciated my work, then he turned to me and said that you still need to be careful while you are at school, and he winked at me.

Even today, I still think that, with a wink, he meant "do not get caught," and not "do not do this anymore." Later, I cut a bunch of such discs and left them in the pile of discs that we hid in class, signed up as games (everyone copied their computer / console games and left copies in the unused school cupboard in our classroom to share. It was pretty cool, to be honest). And having fun listening to people complain in a few days. And then he helped them fix this bug.

10/10 what I would do it again.

Cedric mamo

Fourth story

I once wrote an application in Visual Basic that imitated the “ctrl + alt + del” login image, and installed it on many computers on our school network.

The application was launched before the present login window appeared and recorded the entered username / password, sent them to me by e-mail, and the error message “wrong password” appeared on the screen, regardless of what they entered, and then stopped their work , allowing the user to actually log in.

Thus, I managed to penetrate into several teacher accounts and get access to the Internet! (student accounts were denied access to the Internet). I often sold access to an account with the Internet for 50p per day :)

That was because the times were ...

Jay Kavanagh, website manager at tReds.co.uk

Fifth story

Not me…

But some of my friends acted quite unethical.

He worked under a contract with a company, wrote embedded systems in assembly language (this was in the 1980s).

They were intentionally embedded in the error code, which would manifest itself only in a year or two. The failure was registered very sophisticated, so checking the code would not reveal any malicious intent.

And his contract will end. The system will work, and in a year or two fails will begin. No one can eliminate them, which means that he will receive another profitable contract to eliminate this problem.

Not cool.

Glyn Williams, has written many lines of Swift

Sixth story

Many years ago, when working with clients, I often encountered the problem of non-payments. I'm tired of chasing them to remind them how much they owe me. Then, for the most part, it was about web applications, so it cost them to get the application, and I could do nothing to stop it.

I had the original idea to build loopholes in the code that allowed me to access the application, and often even the entire server on which it worked.

If clients delayed payment, I begged them for a while in the hope that they would pay me. If they did not pay in a certain period of time, I made it so that the application started to behave incorrectly, and in some cases completely deleted it.

It was not the smartest decision, but it worked. Clients wrote to me about the occurrence of problems with the application and asked me to figure it out. Of course, at first they had to pay me what they owed. If they paid, I immediately corrected the application code, and everyone was happy. Now I don’t do that anymore. I work with a phased payment or prepayment.

I used to write malware, but always only for educational purposes, and I never let them out into the world. Once again wrote a rootkit. About many other things I can not speak for legal reasons.

James Jeffery, Software Developer for over 12 years