4 ms·

When I was in high school, we abused "net send" and managed to blast a "all your base are belong to us" message to every PC on campus. We suspected it even rea

When I was in high school, we abused "net send" and managed to blast a "all your base are belong to us" message to every PC on campus. We suspected it even reached other schools in the district. Good times.

ale42 4y ago
The funnier part was that it was pretty easy (by compiling some simple code) to abuse the protocol sending out net send packets with spoofed senders ;-)
emsixteen 4y ago
I did this, to three campuses without realising - My intention was just to send to my classroom. Oops.
throwanem 4y ago
In my younger or customer-service days, I once had an awkward conversation with my manager after a message I'd intended for one person ended up going to everyone in a very prominent credit card issuer with about ten thousand on staff at the time. The only reason I can imagine for why I wasn't fired was because they didn't really want anyone else getting ideas about what to do with the effectively unsecured Windows 2000 machines on their desks, and giving me a reason to keep shtum about it was considered preferable to not giving me one.
Jtsummers 4y ago
We did this in college within our computer labs. Then someone broadcast it to the entire campus. IT blocked it within a few days, but it was fun in the months before that happened.
robin_reala 4y ago
Oh god, this reminds me of a horrific meeting. As IT were the only ones using WinNT we’d set the UPS up to broadcast net send messages to all NT clients if it detected power loss. Unfortunately someone had upgraded the main meeting room’s projector PC to NT without us making that connection. So 5 minutes into the “Of course the company’s fine, ignore the rumours of our impending bankruptcy” meeting with all our major clients, the presentation was interrupted with a big message saying that all the servers were going down in five minutes. Not a good day.
- ahartmetz 4y ago
  So, was the company fine?
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    Permanently two weeks from shutting down, zero budget, and worst the sales teams’ laptops weren’t good enough to run the software we were trying to sell. In the end the company was bought out by a large US org; the sudden cash injection was honestly the best thing that could have happened. Just checked and the product still seems to be around 25 years later, albeit under a different name: https://www.infor.com/products/lx https://www.infor.com/products/lx
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
googlryas 4y ago
Similar story...I was in 10th grade, and we had a teacher who, in study hall, would make us all watch a projector of her monitor just reading awful powerpoint slides about whatever topic she was interested in. I wanted to do my homework in that period since I never did homework at home, but she wouldn't allow it. Other people wanted to quietly socialize but couldn't. Everyone hated it. So on one of the computers in the back of the room, I used windows task scheduler to do something akin to "net send room-6a-teacher COMPUTER MUST BE REBOOTED IMMEDIATELY" every 5 minutes for the duration of the class. The teacher was not very tech savvy, she once claimed to have "deleted regedit, because it looked like a rubiks cube and I don't want games on my computer". She never ended up figuring out why her computer messed up during our class, but it let us have our study hall back as our own. In 12th grade I told my computer networking teacher that story, and he said basically he knew exactly what was happening, but not who did or why they did, so he didn't want to stick his nose in to a study hall, but "I should have figured it was you". I took it as a compliment of the highest order.
HeckFeck 4y ago
Everything is so stingy and uptight now. Stories like this make me feel like I missed the golden era. Yeah, there were genuinely malicious actors. But there was also just plain old fun. So many Windows 2000 machines in my school and I didn't know what power was at my hands...
- ziml77 4y ago
  Unfortunately none of that fun stuff lasted very long. Mostly because word would travel and enough people would know about the things they could mess with. At a certain point is was basically assured that someone would do something exceptionally stupid and get the IT guy to actually figure out how to lock that shit down. Though they never did figure out how we got local admin access to the machines[1]. That was a fairly large security breach actually... once you have local admin, installing a keylogger that drops its logs onto a hidden network share on the machine is trivial. Personally I stayed out of that because my dad would have murdered me if I ever got caught (the friends of mine who did it did end up getting caught!) Still, I found the local admin password was useful for tweaking settings. [1] It was simply by dropping a disc in and booting the machines into a password cracker. Was very fast since it used rainbow tables.
Minor49er 4y ago
I did this too, only my computer lab had the network names labeled on each monitor. So instead of blasting everyone, my friends and I would target other kids, then watch the confusion, which sometimes degraded into chaos
muterad_murilax 4y ago
net send * "message" in a batch script loop was even more fun.
xerox13ster 4y ago
I recall working at a company where we had these messages timed to send at certain hours of the day for monitoring tasks.
hestefisk 4y ago
Hehe I did exactly the same. Got suspended from using the school network for a few months because it flooded the syslog in the Windows 2000 domain controller. Did winpopup use Net send or was it a separate technology?

ale42 4y ago

The funnier part was that it was pretty easy (by compiling some simple code) to abuse the protocol sending out net send packets with spoofed senders ;-)

emsixteen 4y ago

I did this, to three campuses without realising - My intention was just to send to my classroom. Oops.

throwanem 4y ago

In my younger or customer-service days, I once had an awkward conversation with my manager after a message I'd intended for one person ended up going to everyone in a very prominent credit card issuer with about ten thousand on staff at the time. The only reason I can imagine for why I wasn't fired was because they didn't really want anyone else getting ideas about what to do with the effectively unsecured Windows 2000 machines on their desks, and giving me a reason to keep shtum about it was considered preferable to not giving me one.

Jtsummers 4y ago

We did this in college within our computer labs. Then someone broadcast it to the entire campus. IT blocked it within a few days, but it was fun in the months before that happened.

robin_reala 4y ago

Oh god, this reminds me of a horrific meeting. As IT were the only ones using WinNT we’d set the UPS up to broadcast net send messages to all NT clients if it detected power loss. Unfortunately someone had upgraded the main meeting room’s projector PC to NT without us making that connection. So 5 minutes into the “Of course the company’s fine, ignore the rumours of our impending bankruptcy” meeting with all our major clients, the presentation was interrupted with a big message saying that all the servers were going down in five minutes. Not a good day.

ahartmetz 4y ago
So, was the company fine?
- robin_reala 4y ago
  Permanently two weeks from shutting down, zero budget, and worst the sales teams’ laptops weren’t good enough to run the software we were trying to sell. In the end the company was bought out by a large US org; the sudden cash injection was honestly the best thing that could have happened. Just checked and the product still seems to be around 25 years later, albeit under a different name: https://www.infor.com/products/lx https://www.infor.com/products/lx
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

googlryas 4y ago

Similar story...I was in 10th grade, and we had a teacher who, in study hall, would make us all watch a projector of her monitor just reading awful powerpoint slides about whatever topic she was interested in. I wanted to do my homework in that period since I never did homework at home, but she wouldn't allow it. Other people wanted to quietly socialize but couldn't. Everyone hated it. So on one of the computers in the back of the room, I used windows task scheduler to do something akin to "net send room-6a-teacher COMPUTER MUST BE REBOOTED IMMEDIATELY" every 5 minutes for the duration of the class. The teacher was not very tech savvy, she once claimed to have "deleted regedit, because it looked like a rubiks cube and I don't want games on my computer". She never ended up figuring out why her computer messed up during our class, but it let us have our study hall back as our own. In 12th grade I told my computer networking teacher that story, and he said basically he knew exactly what was happening, but not who did or why they did, so he didn't want to stick his nose in to a study hall, but "I should have figured it was you". I took it as a compliment of the highest order.

HeckFeck 4y ago

Everything is so stingy and uptight now. Stories like this make me feel like I missed the golden era. Yeah, there were genuinely malicious actors. But there was also just plain old fun. So many Windows 2000 machines in my school and I didn't know what power was at my hands...

ziml77 4y ago
Unfortunately none of that fun stuff lasted very long. Mostly because word would travel and enough people would know about the things they could mess with. At a certain point is was basically assured that someone would do something exceptionally stupid and get the IT guy to actually figure out how to lock that shit down. Though they never did figure out how we got local admin access to the machines[1]. That was a fairly large security breach actually... once you have local admin, installing a keylogger that drops its logs onto a hidden network share on the machine is trivial. Personally I stayed out of that because my dad would have murdered me if I ever got caught (the friends of mine who did it did end up getting caught!) Still, I found the local admin password was useful for tweaking settings. [1] It was simply by dropping a disc in and booting the machines into a password cracker. Was very fast since it used rainbow tables.

Minor49er 4y ago

I did this too, only my computer lab had the network names labeled on each monitor. So instead of blasting everyone, my friends and I would target other kids, then watch the confusion, which sometimes degraded into chaos

muterad_murilax 4y ago

net send * "message" in a batch script loop was even more fun.

xerox13ster 4y ago

I recall working at a company where we had these messages timed to send at certain hours of the day for monitoring tasks.

hestefisk 4y ago

Hehe I did exactly the same. Got suspended from using the school network for a few months because it flooded the syslog in the Windows 2000 domain controller. Did winpopup use Net send or was it a separate technology?