Office Humor Blog

This prank requires a little “hacking” into your coworker’s computer. You’ll have to have access to their computer, either remotely or just hope they don’t lock their computer when they get up. I’ll give step by step instructions on how to make it so certain sites redirect to sites of your choosing, similar to what some adware programs do.

Requirements:

• Time (low) - if you only want to mess with a few sites it shouldn’t take you much more than 10-20 minutes. You can, however, decide to screw with a lot of sites if you have the time.
• Cost (none) - none.
• Risk (low) - the only risk here is upsetting your coworker. No permanent damage or harm should come of this prank.

Steps:

1. Get into your coworker’s computer. You’ll need access to their windows directory, so unless your network is weird and has everybody’s windows directory shared, you’ll probably need to get access to their computer.
2. Open the “hosts” file. For Windows XP it’s located at “c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc”, for Windows 2k “c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc”, and for Win 98\ME “c:\windows”. You should see a file with a Microsoft copyright at the top, some text explaining the hosts file, and a line near the bottom that says “127.0.0.1 localhost”.
3. This file controls custom mappings for IP addresses. What that means is that you can specify a domain and specify whatever IP address you want that domain to go to. For example, you can have www.google.com go to whatever site you want, instead of the actual good site.
4. Determine what sites you want to mess with, and where you want them to go. To find the IP address of a site, open the command prompt (use start, then run, then type in cmd). Type ping then the site you want to grab the IP address to. For example, “ping www.google.com”. This should return the IP address for you.
5. Put the IP address you want to be the “new” site on the left of the hosts file, press tab, then enter the domain you want to change. For example, “216.109.112.135 [tab] www.google.com” (replacing the [tab] with an actual tab). This would make the browser go to yahoo every time the person tries to go to yahoo.
6. Once you have all your IP addresses and domains entered, save the file and test it out. You should be able to go to all the domains you entered and have them go to the sites specified by the IP addresses you placed in the file.
7. One of the best things to do is to change their start page to a new site. So if their start page is msn.com, for example, have it go to a porn site or a site with a lot of pop ups.

Result:

Once your coworker attempts to go to any site you modified, the alternate site should show instead. Depending on what you modified, your results will vary. If you went to sites with sound and your coworker has speakers, you can get some fantastically embarassing results. Some classic ideas are porn sites, job search sites (such as monster.com), and sites to things your coworker hates (such as a democrat site if they are republican and vice versa). There are endless possibilities.

You coworker will probably think a virus or spyware was installed on their computer. Make sure to not let them format or do anything else that could lose their work because of the prank (unless that’s what you want to happen, which I don’t recommend).