Jun 5, 2007

Use Autoit and "Stick it to the Man"

Many moons ago, there was this guy who worked for an evil company as a help desk technician. The guy had an evil boss that promised him a sweet promotion to desktop technician so the guy wouldn't leave the company, only to screw the guy later by changing his title, and those of the rest of the team, as well as making them all man the phone system a week later. Also, the boss decided to monitor the employees hours by checking which time they logged into the call center system. The boss would dock them if they were a few minutes late, or left early. Jaded over the double cross with the promotion, the employee got an idea on how to do a little screwing of his own.

The call center system was software that ran on Windows XP, and required the technician to sign in with their pin number. Once logged in, the technician could set themselves into a ready or non ready state. The only problem with the system was that it wasn't hot key friendly, and it didn't have any command line switches or functions. Automation of the sign in process would be difficult.

Well, the desktop technician (Who was now a Systems Support Specialist do to the stupid title change) had once played with a utility called Autoit, which lets you write a script using simple programming language and compile it into a self running executable. You could program all sorts of repetitive tasks like mouse movements, clicks and typing among other things. Well, the technician decided to write a program using Autoit that would automatically log him into the system so it wouldn't matter when he really came and went, and would never have to worry about being docked in pay.

Once the program was tested, the desktop technician set the program to run everyday at a certain time using a scheduled task. The second problem with the setup was that group policy set the workstations to lock out after a certain amount of time for security reasons. So the desktop technician set Windows to auto login at bootup using a registry setting (Click here to see what it is). Now, he only needed the screen to be unlocked for about 10 seconds so that the script could log him into the phone system, after that he wanted his workstation locked back up. So he wrote another Autoit program that would lock the workstation. He set altogether, three scheduled tasks. One to reboot the computer in the morning which would force the computer to unlock and auto login to Windows, then the second one would log him into the call center, and the third would lock his workstation.

Long story short, the technician never had to worry about being "late" again, and he was simultaneously sticking it to the man.

He also used the program to create a little utility that would lock the workstation and set the program to run in a never ending loop, so if you ran it it would lock the workstation, and no matter how many times you logged back in it would turn around and lock you right back out. It is a great practical joke program, and is easily overcome by a reboot, and doesn't really harm anything, oh, and it only works on Windows XP and later...But that is another story. In the meantime you can play with that little locker program here ;-)

I assume no responsibility if the locker program is misused. It is meant for entertainment purposes only.


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