getting your own back

Some time ago I made a request here for help with an article I was writing for a UK computer magazine. I needed stories from people who'd used the internet to exact revenge on an enemy, and after the link hit the front page of Fark I had a great response. Here are some of the stories I received -- with the writers remaining anonymous, of course. Thanks to everyone who responded.

Trojan terrors
"Three years ago the internet was installed at my school and the entire campus came back to school with jacks in our rooms. Compared to dialup, this new network was heaven. We filled our days with Half-Life instead of classes.
"Then I discovered Back Orifice. It's basically a program that, once installed on a mark's computer, takes control of the entire system. Well, my friend Collin kept complaining about his roommate. His mate, Adam, was the kind of guy that wouldn't let you in the room if he was being moody. The tension elevated when Adam would masturbate for long periods of time while Collin was sleeping - to the point of waking him up with moans. Needless to say, it messed with Collin's head. So Collin came to me and we thought out of the process. I embedded the Back Orifice into a porn screensaver. We fired off an email spoofed to look like it came from one of his jock boy, ass touching friends. As we expected, he ran the screensaver of Pamela Anderson and our game had begun.
"Back Orifice let us control everything. He'd be chatting on AIM and we'd type words for him. We'd set his homepage to poopsex.com. Every time a girl was in his room we'd open up homosexual images full screen. And how did we know if a girl was over? Well, we had complete control of his webcam. He would start to make out with whoever and we'd open the CD Tray and flash messages on his screen. Later that night we watched him lock the door and put a chair under the handle. And then he began his masturbation ritual. It was absolutely disgusting. Ah, but we had the wherewithal to record the private deed.
"Two days later we had circulated the video through the Intranet along with his name just in case the clarity was a little grainy. And to add to the fun, I grabbed a still from the video and Photoshopped it into a poster. Let me just say, there was a couple days, all over my Christian college campus, where - no matter where you went - you could see posted an obvious Adam pleasuring himself. Thanks to the glorious internet, Collin says that he was never woken up again by rampant masturbation."


Photo finish
"Several years ago I decided to exact revenge on a business rival that was notorious for sleeping his way into listing real estate. I had been up against this rival for a listing with a gay couple and although we are both gay, I wouldn't sleep my way into a paycheque. As a result, the couple did not choose me to list their home even though I lived in their neighbourhood and was much more qualified to handle the price range of the property.
"I was aware that this real estate sales person was not only a closeted gay man, but also highly involved in the leather and drug scene. I did my research and proceeded to find out several of the screen names he was using. Since he is an AOL user and dumb as a stump it wasn't too hard to figure them out. I entered our local AOL gay chatrooms under made up screen names that had profiles that I designed to attack my prey.
"Within hours, my rival was chatting me up and asking me what kinds of leather and kink I was into. I had planned well and had collected an entire set of pictures of one guy that I could send. As a result, I was able to con him into sending me three of the most disgusting pictures of himself dressed in leather.
"The beauty of this has been that several other realtors in our area have had a field day with the pictures. There were even holding ‘viewing parties' shown at several Board of Realtor members' homes. The poor hussy in question had to move to another real estate office because he was laughed right out of the one he worked for!"


Fat chance
"In the months leading up to my wedding, one of my bridesmaids began to show some serious jealousy through manipulative, vindictive behaviour. This was a girl who was never very popular with anyone prior to my inviting her out with my group of friends. She had terrible self-confidence and she really let it show.
"She had never had a date before and though she wasn't ugly, she was not really naturally cute but was overweight and built like NFL football player. She was given a humped posture and a very flat butt. Through hanging out with me, she began to make lots of new friends and even began semi-dating a guy that had never looked twice before I took her under my wing. Finally, as soon as she truly gained some confidence in herself for the first time in her life, she just decided that she would just go back to her ugly little ways. She began bad-mouthing me and I guess just became so confident that she used me like a stepping stool and then just kicked me to the side.
"After nine months of dealing with her crap, I posted an internet personal ad via largeandlovely.com, describing her ideal man as ‘the bigger the better' and herself by a very realistic physical description but with a few southern redneck connotations thrown in to really attract some winners. Needless to say, I never dreamed how bombarded she's be by very large men interested in meeting her. According to my friends, she was horrified and humiliated, because deep down she had to admit the physical description was accurate.
"She ended up on anti-depressants because she was so upset about being labelled a fatass via the web. The worst part is that the internet service must have made her email visible to the senders, because even when she had her ad removed, she continued to get emails from men for months. I hope she boo-hooed all night long"


Hack back
"My boyfriend is the system guy at a small school. One evening he was doing some system maintenance, and while running a packet sniffer (in an effort to troubleshoot something entirely unrelated) he detected someone trying to hack into the school's server. So, he ran nmap [a UNIX port scanning utility] on the attempted encroacher's machine and saw that there were ports left wide open on it. Taking advantage of a Win98 security flaw, he entered the would-be hacker's machine and poked around a bit on its hard drive, where he discovered a number of ‘hidden' folders, many of which contained quite an extensive porn collection. So, he took the contents of the hidden porn folders and moved them into the machine's startup folder.
"The next time the machine was booted, this user would be in for quite a surprise. Along with the porn deluge, he included a simple message that would pop up when the system was booted: ‘Please stop trying to hack into my server.'
"Not sure when the next system reboot would occur, and wanting to make certain his message would be seen and understood, he proceeded to ping the IP until the system crashed."


Netbus nightmares
"Let's roll back the clock to 1999, and my college has its brand new fibreoptic network in the dorms. Nobody knows what network cards are good for, so all the guys from my dorm are installing them for everyone. "While we did so, one of the roommates installed a fun little program called Netbus along with the network card drivers. It allowed any of us to control their computer from our consoles down the hallway. It was limited, but worth its weight in bandwidth. Anyway, we reserved our powers for good.
"Example: One guy down the hallway was cheating on his girlfriend, a girl that we all got along with, but she wouldn't believe it. They went into his room for some ‘alone time', and when they did, we flipped on the program and opened up a porn site (or 10) on his computer. It took about 10 minutes before she broke up with his sorry ass, screaming obscenities about what a pervert he was."


Naked on the Net
"I had a psycho ex-girlfriend who would not accept the fact that I was breaking up with her. She was stalking me and everything. At one point, she sent me a nude picture of herself, with a note asking "Don't you want this?" I eventually got her to go away, but always kept the picture. Years later, I made a small web page and posted the picture on the internet! It wasn't a big thing, because I am the only one who knew the site was there, and I never told anyone about it, but it was a little bit of revenge knowing that after I did this, that she had technically been ‘naked on the internet'.
"With another ex-girlfriend, I Photoshopped her face onto another woman's nude body and posted it to a newsgroup. Since it wasn't really her body, I didn't violate any laws, but I'll bet there are lots of guys who downloaded it and kept in their collections, thinking it was the real thing!"


Wiping Windows
"About six months ago I was employed at a local grocery store. There was a particular employee who I did not get along with. He was rude, and had this whole power issue because he had seniority over me. I tried to handle the situation in a more confrontational way, er physically, but he used some stupid excuse.
"His younger sister went to school with me so I befriended her, and began talking to her on MSN. I eventually got her to give me her IP address unknowing what one could do with it. Later I sent her a file and claimed it was something that it wasn't. It was, in fact, a Trojan. Now the computer was her brother's, who I disliked much. I also knew that he was running an illegal copy of Windows XP and had no anti-virus software.
"Once I had the Trojan installed I had complete free reign. I constantly opened and closed the CD draw of his computer, flipped the whole screen upside down or backwards, basically utilizing and testing every feature of the Trojan. When I became bored, I simply deleted his boot.ini file and just like that his computer crashed and XP never started again. Last I heard he had to do a fresh install, after formatting, and I was off clean with nothing to link me back to it."