They talk about this like it's a new phenomenon but I distinctly remember this being super common in the windows 95 to vista days. Like I went to some kid's house and he would do something like try and tell everyone he knew how to 'hack google' and he used use some obviously sketchy as hell tool which just ran a whois on their domain to show their address, and this was all the evidence that he was 'hacking', and we all clowned on him for it and how he probably just installed a virus on himself. He ended up finding some extremely obvious viruses some kid thought would be funny to leave on a network share at school called something like 'sexyporn.jpg.exe' and getting expelled for being daft enough to execute them
We used to run `tree` and tell the computer lab teacher we were hacking the school, government, etc. It always got a strong reaction out of her, she was a good typing instructor (and a genuinely nice person) but was out of her depth with computers. What little shits we were.
Oh man, the days before blocking net send was a common school sysadmin practice…
Back when I was a highschool freshman (2004-05) I wrote a batch script that would fire off net sends to everyone in the computer lab in rapid succession in an infinite loop, then just sort of left it on a shared drive with a conspicuous name. Sure enough, a few days later, someone ran it out of curiosity and got in trouble, but of course the file had my username in the metadata, and my computer teacher was like “Chris, you knew what you were doing, don’t do this again.”
It was the kind of “good clean fun” sort of prank that doesn’t get you in hot water or suspended, but was hilarious to watch play out.
Edit: Just re-read and saw that your friend got expelled for doing basically the same thing I did. That sucks. I’ll note that I went to an IT-focused votech school, so I think a lot of folks had a better sense of perspective as to how serious net send pranks actually were in the grand scheme of things.
That's wild, because the only way we were able to mount network drives that had stuff hidden on them by other students in the know was "net use". The drives would be visible to us on the network but if we merely clicked on them it would give us access denied, but a little two line bat script would let us mount and open the drives with no problems. Must have been windows 2000 server badly configured. I remember some other kid getting in trouble for the net send thing but I think he was being obscene to someone else who got mad enough... Everyone saw the obvious viruses and didn't click them but that one kid. As soon as he did that they found our little secret network share and closed it off. We definitely referred to him as a 'skiddie' after that lol
We just used it for a place to run scorched earth from on the whole network without having to download it to our home folders where it'd get noticed and punished
you wouldn't believe how scary computers were to most people. Once i added a batch file with the shutdown command in the startup folder of one computer, as a prank (trivially fixable by booting into safe mode) and got banned from the computer rooms because "i compromised every computer in the school" apparently.
They never discovered the rats we actually had installed on all their computers. They were still there years after I left, until they upgraded the computers.
I was in high school in the late 80s and early 90s, I'm well aware. :-)
We (a few friends and I) were basically the Novell Netware admins because our school didn't have a full-time computer tech and none of the teachers knew anything about it. We convinced them to let us help them in exchange for letting us read the manuals and tinker around, and we actually did help with problems and troubleshooting, mostly printing if I remember.
They never figured out it meant we also had access to the teacher-only folders though.
