Office prank disk wipe erases coworker files and trust

The story comes from a reader-submitted column of workplace confessions, so it is one person’s account and the names are disguised. The engineer, called Joe, landed a job in the messaging lab of an Australian mobile carrier while he was still studying for an electrical engineering degree, back in the MS-DOS era.

He described an office full of practical jokers. People left confetti boxes balanced on doors, rubbed hand cream on phone earpieces and even hid prawn heads under the carpet of a senior engineer’s car.

One colleague, nicknamed TF, had a less inventive habit. He would creep up behind Joe and roar in his ear to make him jump. Joe decided his payback would be a single, memorable strike rather than a running feud. He waited for the right moment, which came in his final week, while TF was away at a conference.

The prank worked because it looked real and arrived long after anyone would suspect Joe. Every PC in the office had Borland’s C compiler installed, a tool for turning code into runnable programs. Joe used it to write a small, harmless program that copied the look of the MS-DOS command that formats, or wipes, a disk.

To sell the illusion, the program wrote throwaway data to a temporary file. That made the drive’s activity light flicker as if the disk really was being erased. After a few minutes of this, it showed a message admitting the whole thing was a joke.

Then came the timing. Joe added his program to AUTOEXEC.BAT, a startup file that DOS computers read every time they boot and use to run commands automatically. He set it to quit silently on every start until a month after his departure.

About five or six weeks later, a former coworker phoned him. TF had switched on his PC that morning and had been badly shaken by what he saw. Joe, long gone by then, declared it a case of mission accomplished.

The prank landed because people trust what their screen tells them, especially when it looks like a message from the operating system. Scammers rely on exactly that reflex, and they are far less kind than Joe.

Security writers use the word scareware for software that throws up alarming, frivolous warnings to frighten users. Some websites show pop-ups built to look like they come from your own computer, claiming it is infected and pushing you to click, call or pay. Microsoft also warns that some malware disguises itself as a browser update, and that tech support scammers try to persuade you something is wrong with your PC so they can remotely fix it.

The difference from Joe’s joke is the ending. His program confessed after a few minutes. A scam screen wants your card number, your password or remote access to your machine.

The real lesson is about staying calm and being ready if the worst ever does happen. A few habits cover most of the risk:

• Don’t trust a scary pop-up on its own. Close it and check from your own settings or security app. If you are told your browser needs an urgent update, Microsoft’s advice is to close the message and use the browser’s Help and About page, which checks for genuine updates.
• Never call a phone number or install a tool that a warning screen gives you.
• Keep backups. A common rule of thumb is three copies of your data, on two different kinds of storage, with one kept somewhere else, such as in the cloud.
• Unplug at least one backup drive when you are not using it, since ransomware can reach a drive that stays connected.

At work, the safest rule is simple: don’t install your own programs on someone else’s PC, even for a laugh. A joke that leans on panic can go wrong, and most IT teams would treat a hidden startup program as a security problem, whatever the intent.

Today’s genuine version of TF’s nightmare is ransomware, malware that encrypts your files and demands payment to unlock them. Newer strains also steal data and threaten to publish it. If you are hit, the FBI recommends not paying, because there is no guarantee you will get your files back and paying can make you a target again.

That is why a backup that lives offline matters more than any antivirus pop-up. It turns a disaster back into an annoyance, much like the moment TF realized his disk was fine.