Reply to post:

I was brought in by a company to firefight issues when their sysadmin left/was fired under bad circumstances and deleted all the docs and reset all the passwords on his way out. There wasn't even network diagrams and they had 3 branch offices in the UK alone that I knew about.

So I started to map out the network with nmap and friends and take some dumps of traffic just to get a idea of things and it was in pretty bad shape, no firewalls and routed to the internet with all sorts of out of place packets wandering round. Then I noticed a vnc server on our internal ip range. A quick probe and it hadn't even got a password securing it, so vncclient was fired up, and someone's xp desktop appeared. I tried to identify with some others round the office where this machine was, and nobody had a clue. So I opened notepad and started typing, and for some reason I just remembered the original amiga SCA virus and I had a bit of a mischevous streak back then, "Your computer is alive" then it went dark suddenly.

The guy I answered to called me into the office later that day, and gave me a telling off with a smirk on his face (fair cop, it wasn't the most responsible thing to type, I was quite young back then and hadn't taken the full corporate faceless emotionless persona mandatory training course) and asked me to refrain from doing it again.

Apparently it had been identified as a machine belonging to the middle aged secretary that ran the scottish branch. And we knew this for sure because it had come down that she had been sat at the computer wondering why the mouse kept going funny while fighting for control of the cursor, then when the window opened and declared the computer was alive, fearing RoTM, she yanked the power cord and keyboard out and pushed it off her desk screaming in terror.

Not as irresponsible as printer bod, but we've all been tempted. I don't think I would have hooked their address book out and printed to prove a point though, not even way back in the days this story was from.