Most embarrasing hack you've ever done?

[Kulverstukas]

Ohai. People seem to keep talking about their most rewarding hack and that's fine, but... what is your most embarrassing hack/achievement/tech related thing you've ever done? embarrassing or regretful, which ever you want to tell us about
No one is going to laugh at you for posting, we are all human, this is just for the lulz!

Oh lord, I can't really remember the most embarrassing hack I've ever done frankly but I had made lots... maybe one was when I connected a computer that had a switch 220v/110v. I didn't now wtf it was so while it was powered on, I flipped the switch. Everything almost started burning somehow and shit was tight I suddenly realized what happened and blamed everything on a faulty PSU

[Ragehottie]

Mine happened less than a week ago. I backuped my friends harddrive because long story. I used a linux usb to do it and formatted the portable harddrive i was copying everything on in a linux format. I re-installed windows and when I open the portable harddrive to get their files off, it said I needed to format it. I just stared at it for like 5 minutes and said "Uhhhh, ummmm......sorry." A couple minutes later I figured out it and everything was fine and dandy. But for those two minutes I just wanted to kill myself....

[Pak_Track]

This happened months ago. I hacked into my friend's facebook account, changed the password and shit. Then the next day when I was logging into it, I realized that I'd forgotten the password.
I was like

[Snayler]

Well, I'm not gonna tell you about one embarrassing hack, as I honestly can't remember about one from the top of my head, but I'll tell something someone did to me:

While at school, working on our final project, me and my colleagues had to build a simulated enterprise network. In between installing OS's and services, and configuring them, I often found myself bored. So one time, I noticed that a colleague was using one of the project computers (which was running debian) to use facebook. Since we had ssh access to every computer, I ssh'd to his computer, ps aux | grep empathy and kill -9 <empathy PID> (yes, it's not a real hack since I already had access, but that's not the point, keep reading). This happened about three times before I busted laughing at his "WTF is happening" expression, which gave me away.

Anyway, he seemed like he didn't mind much, and after a while I went outside for a smoke. When I got back and sat in front of my laptop, I noticed the USB keyboard and mouse I was using weren't working. Since it was a laptop, I just used the touchpad and built-in keyboard to find out what happened. I knew he obviously did something, so I started acting all like "meh, I'll solve the issue in no time". Well...

While using the touchpad, I noticed he had taken a printscreen of my desktop and set it as the wallpaper, hid the taskbar on top,... Oldest play on the book, easy to figure out. Little I knew he had a trick up his sleeve...

Next, I checked the base of the mouse for duct tape, checked if the cables were cut, checked the device manager for uninstalled drivers, re-installed keyboard/mouse drivers, checked USB drivers, re-installed USB drivers, switched USB ports, booted Linux instead of windows... I spent 30 minutes scratching my head, but nothing fucking worked.

When I finally gave up, he looked at me smiling and said: "Look at the USB connector...". Fuck me! The bastard had cut two small pieces of duct tape and placed them on top of the USB contacts of both the keyboards connector and the mouse connector. Shit, I never would have thought to look there! I felt so embarrassed... 

Well, at least I learned a new trick 

[Rav3n]

Mine exploded right in my face 

A short circuit fried my speaker's transformer ( the one that convert the 220v/110v to the power the speaker use ), so i just replaced it with a new one ( simple isn't it  )

BUT totally forgot about the wiring and connected it backward, Then Plugged in the speaker for testing and BOOOM, the new transformer exploded in my face. 

[IFailStuff]

http://www.freeindex.co.uk/business-advice/advice-on-bringing-a-hacker-to-justice_524.htm

LOL

[silenthunder]

It's not a real hack, but people viewed it as one because, well you'll see.

I go to the computer lab at school, got somethin to type up for a teacher and I wanna see what's hoppin on EZ and all that.. All the computers are off but one. OK, I'll go use it. Turns out somebody is already logged on, and I don't like them so much. So I go about defacing his account and such, log out and log into mine. It takes roughly 30 minutes to type the paper up, I log off and leave.

The next day, I was told that there were only 2 people using that computer the day before. Obviously they knew that his account was defaced. They said the login/logout times were very close together for the two accounts, and that they had a camera in the room, however the camera didn't have a timestamp to verify the logon information. So they asked me if I had hacked his account and done bad things to it. I replied: "no, why?" Their answer was, word for word: "We saw that you were typing for a very long time on the computer." I GOT BLAMED FOR IT BECAUSE I WAS TYPING A BUNCH. So I proved to them that I was typing a paper for a teacher, found out that someone had defaced the paper (it was on a local student server) and showed that to them, they let it go.

Stupidest shit ever.

[Darkvision]

well i was going to post a lot more than this one the first time, but my computer deciding to crash managed to somehow delete everything in this box, yet let me keep typing that i was hoping i was gonna save it! well i posted that thought and nothing else...sigh. so just one story for now.


I was working as a aCAD tech building houses for a small business I was also doing all of our IT stuff. Well my boss gets this 3g air card to use, and wants to share his 3g card to his box with a ethernet cable as well as over an ad hoc network with my laptop. Now i had read before that this sort of thing was impossible.(direct from Microsoft itself in fact) I tell him this and he says that he had done it before(yeah right stupid user, it CANT be done). But he is the boss so i proceed to spend the next 12 hours trying to get this to work. i try EVERYTHING. every damn gimmick i can think of, i look online for other gimmicks i can try, hell i use the ad hoc network to break into his pc to try and in essence STEAL the damn internet. no go, on all of it. so i tell him "see told you it wasnt possible" and leave for the day.


I come in the next morning, and he has it working. and he is just smirking ear to ear(he deserved to i will give him that). I ask how he got it to work, and he walked me through it....you open the windows network wizard and well, just click a few times and BAM shared internet over a wireless ad hoc network. I had never bothered using the wizard to try to do it because, well you would THINK windows would know more about its product than the people that use it, guess not.


Still it was a good lesson for me. If someone tells you such and such is not possible on a PC, they are wrong. It may not be worth the time to figure out a work around, but it is possible.

[parad0x]

If I remember correctly, it was around 5 years ago.
I was just wandering around and i came to know there's a change language setting. I thought to have fun with the settings so I changed the setting to russian. Then I came back to see how everything is written in russian. Soon, I fed up cuz I was unable to understand so I went into the setting menu but I forgot in which option the language setting was. I searched the whole settings menu but since I can't understand anything, I was unable t change the setting to English. I thought to reset the phone but I knew it was of no use and it'll format the data also. After the hard work of several hours, I searched again and again the whole settings menu and then restored the original English language. That day I decided not to change things about I don't know.
I was really embarrassed.

[RedBullAddicted]

 This is not really a hack but it was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me in my complete life as a network technician. Can’t remember the exact time but it must be something about 6-7 years ago when I started working as a junior network consultant. A colleague of mine build a network (a small one with only 6 switches for an iSCSI environment) at a customer site and another guy from a different company installed the storage appliance. Both happened on different days. After the guy left who installed the storage devices the customer called and said one of the switches would be broken and led to a network crash and someone should come to check the switch. My colleague was not available at this day and I drove there to have a look. I checked the switch inside out and came to the point that the switch was completely functioning. The customer said if the switch is ok then plug it to the network again. RBA, young and without much experience, did not check the other 5 switches in the topology and connected the switch to the network. After connecting the first link everything was fine. Naïve how he was he connected to redundant link which immediately caused the complete network to crash. All virtual machines running on the storage devices crashed too and the complete company network stood still for almost 2 hours. You can’t imagine the feeling I had. I was so fucking sweaty and thought I would get a heart attack. Later after checking all switches I realized that the dump ass who installed the storage thought the switch configuration was wrong as his storage box had bad performance and turned of spanning tree on one of them. That was the reason for the first crash and for sure for the second crash too. The customer never wanted me to come over to help them with their network again J This day I learned to double and triple check everything before I do something.. lol. This was the darkest day in my complete career.. lol. I really hope that something like that never happens to me again.   
 

[Kulverstukas]

I remembered another embarrassing one
Ha, it was a very long time ago, I too didn't have much experience with software and all that shit. I was tasked to reinstall windows xp. Simple enough, right? well not quite. The computer had newer type of SATA drives, that winXP setup does not recognize without 3rd party drivers loaded from a floppy during the setup. I didn't had the drivers and had no idea why the setup couldn't see the drive... I knew prior to fixing this that the computer was infected with a virus that messed things up, I though it was a nasty case of a rootkit, so I proceeded to boot up puppy linux to see if I could ID something on the drive... later I formatted and wiped the drive completely, which contained masses of info, like personal pictures and shit.... puppy linux had a terminal-based formatting utility and I was only to change something on the drive, not to format it, as dumb as it was, I didn't read all of the warning messages and agreed to everything default, which led to a complete wipe of the drive.
At the time I didn't realize what I had done and proceeded to boot up the winxp setup. When I saw the drive still can't be found... I was like RBA. Heart pounding, sweating like a pig, and all the time I had the owner sitting beside me
At that moment I understood what I had done... couldn't look into his eyes and the PC was still fucked, but now even worse

I learned my lesson from that, the hard way.

[lucid]

Uhh.. Idk. Not really a hack. I 'hacked' my girlfriends's stepmother's facebook. Deleted her yahoo account, deleted her facebook, and of course changed the passwords so she couldn't re-register in the fourteen days or whatever it was. Then I spent the next couple of days telling her what could have done it. I told her that Russians make alot of viruses that they infect Americans with and a new one came out that deletes Americans facebook accounts. I ran a Hitman scan and indeed found viruses on her computer so it made it easier to blame them for it. Within a couple of days she had recovered everything due to some "website that recovers your facebook account." Whatever she used to do that let her know that he facebook was deleted from another computer in the house. So I told her that Russians can make it look like other computers in the house installed the virus.

Lol and stuff.

[Darkvision]

This one isnt a fail on my part and not really a hack, but i think should be shared(you will see why!).


one day after lunch, im coming back into my shop on board my ship and it is MASS panic. Their is 40 IT's running back and forth across the shop, people yelling over each other with bugged out eyes. I mean no joke it was like they all decided to snort a pound of coke, and had just lost their shit after it. So one of our techs sees me and yells out "its (name omitted!)" like a chorus i hear "oh its(name omitted) he will know what to do" "yeah he will" "lets ask him!" so i have no joke this giant circle of 20-30 IT's around me all trying to talk over one another to explain to me what the problem is. So this is where the "problem" is explained you see we have this weird migrating problem. it started with just one server where this red light came on. then it spread to more servers on the same rack, then to the others, and one will go off but reinfect 3 more! WHAT IS IT! AHHHH. so i go "oh i know that is" you see everyone visibly relax and takes what seems to be their first breath in an hour. when i hear "(name omitted) get over here". Its my first class, so i must obey! i go over and he (very quietly) asks me what i think it is. I tell him its the rack position indicator light, you use it to make sure you know which server you are working on (it lights up both on the front and the back). he goes "yeah thats basically right. im using it to teach a lesson so be quite. NO THATS NOT IT! GET OUT OF THE WAY SO THEY CAN FIGURE IT OUT YOU OBVIOUSLY DONT KNOW ANYTHING".


 If the scene in my shop when i entered was like charlie sheen after a 3 day coke binge, i dont know how to describe the panic that ensued after. choruses of oh no (name omitted) didnt know! or variations of it went off around the shop, 10 IT's run to the servers, 20 IT's jump on PC's trying to look up whats going on, 5-10 of em are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. And here is me, trying not to laugh my ass off. Anyway it took around an hour for someone to finally RTFM and find out what that little light was. I'm not sure if it classified as a teaching tool, or one hell of a troll, but its defiantly a HUGE fail. good times.


Oh and since i didnt know where to put it, the 1st class had been simply walking over to the servers (while they were at them!) and hitting the buttons while "checking up" on their progress.

[Axon]

I think the title is a bit misleading, people are talking about embarrassing moments that have no connection with hacking. Although the title says "hack"?. As for me, I haven't done anything stupid other than screwing up my S3, then I got it back working smoothly. I don't know if this fits the standards of this thread.

@Snayler: That's a very smart trick by your friend, well played.

[purelysam]

This isn't a hack but a while back my Grandparents asked me to change there OS from 95 to XP. So I thought this can't be too hard, they told me they had backups of everything so I commenced the installation. Once completed, they gave me a bunch of floppy discs and told me to reconfigure the internet.

I still have no idea how to reconfigure there dialup internet with these floppy discs, and I felt like death knowing that they'd have to call someone in just to refix the line.