(Newswire.net — June 25, 2019) — Usually, when we hear a story about hacking, it comes in the form of a warning. Guard your passwords. Don’t respond to phishing scams. Be wary of public wi-fi. And it’s good to be cautious! We should take the dangers seriously, and invest time and resources into cybersecurity — both at home and in our businesses.
But hacking ventures aren’t always grim. In fact, hackers sometimes do a job just for the laughs– and we get to enjoy the results, too. Here are five of the funniest hacks out there.
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MI6 replaced Al-Quaeda bomb instructions with…a recipe for cupcakes.
In the early 2010s, British intelligence organization MI6 was waging cyber war on the remnants of Al-Qaeda. They directed their efforts towards a particular threat: the terrorist organization had just started publishing an online magazine, and within it, they included detailed instructions on how to make bombs in your very own home.
Luckily, MI6 agents were able to infiltrate the website and change out those instructions. Would-be terrorists could open the magazine, but instead of steps for how to make a bomb, they would be treated to the celebrated cupcake recipe from the Ellen DeGeneres show. Maybe it was still dangerous: the recipe for rocky road cupcakes included the line “warning: sugar rush ahead!”
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Vogue gets a Jurassic Park makeover
In the summer of 2013, some enterprising computer whizz found that whoever had designed the Vogue website had included a secret command. This wasn’t a hack exactly, but rather an easter egg that the original web developers included and then, just…forgot to tell anybody?
If you went to the Vogue website and were to input what’s known as the “Konami code” (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A) something very special would happen. You would be treated to a parade of dinosaurs (velociraptors, specifically) wearing fancy hats. Red hats, tams, hats with feathers: no fashion is neglected by the dinos.
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Hacked printers make robot art
In 2017, a self-described “pissed off high school student” from the UK sat down and started building a short program in C. A few hours later, roughly 150,000 internet-connected printers across the world started to spit out ASCII art depicting friendly robots, and messages announcing that they were “part of a flaming botnet.”
Many of the hacked printers were connected to restaurant POS systems, meaning that innocent waiters across the world went to get a credit card receipt and found, instead, some robot art.
In an interview with VICE, the hacker claimed he did it to warn against the “internet of things.” He argued, “people need to take their printer out of the public internet unless it’s needed, to be honest. And if it’s needed, they should be whitelisting IPs/IP subnets or using a VPN to access the local network.”
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Prime Minister Bean
Back in 2010, the Prime Minister of Spain was a man named Jose Luis Zapatero. Things were not going well– an economic crisis had led to mass protests, and parts of the country were vying for independence.
This might be why a hacker used cross-site scripting to replace Zapatero on the EU presidency site with famous British comedian Mr. Bean. Spain was the president of the EU that year, so Zapatero’s face was normally prominent on the website. To be fair, Zapatero does kind of look like Mr. Bean, and he had suffered the comparisons before.
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Trump tweets Lil’ Wayne lyrics
Do you remember what we thought of Donald Trump in 2013? If not, that’s okay. Back then he was just another reality TV star in a bad suit. But he was still famous enough to be the target of a Twitter hack job.
One glorious morning, somebody managed to get into Trump’s twitter account, and proceeded to tweet a line from Will.I.Am’s “Scream & Shout.” Specifically, a line from Lil’Wayne’s verse: “These hoes think they classy, / well, that’s the class I’m skippen.”
Unfortunately for posterity, the tweet was taken down quickly. The Donald explained that his twitter had been “seriously hacked” and that they were looking for the perpetrators. As far as we know, they were never found.