Hack Like a Pro: How to Haunt Your Boss's Computer & Drive Him Insane

Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! In today's hack, we're going to have a bit of Halloween fun.

Have you ever had a boss who made you miserable with his micro-management and nagging? Maybe you thought he unfairly fired your friend/colleague? Well, now here's your chance to get a bit of revenge and keep him or her off your back!

• Don't Miss: Haunt Your Boss with This Halloween Prank

We're going to hack our boss's Windows 7 machine and make him or her believe the computer is haunted!

I'm not going to go into the details of how to exploit the system, as I have covered that in previous tutorials. You can find some of those here and here. I'm going to assume you have successfully exploited his computer and you now have a meterpreter prompt.

Step 1: Kill His Excel

As you can see, after exploiting his system, we have a meterpreter prompt on our boss's computer.

Let's type ps to see what processes are running on his computer.

• ps

Notice that he has Excel running. He's probably doing his sales/financial projections. Let's irritate him a little bit by killing his Excel spreadsheet.

We can do that by simply typing kill with the Process ID from the ps listing.

• kill 1400

As you can see, we killed his Excel application! Hopefully, he now will scratching his head and wondering what happened, but probably not yet convinced that his computer is haunted.

Step 2: Shutdown His PC

Now that he's a little puzzled by the inexplicable closing of his Excel spreadsheet, let's follow up with some more ghostly activity. What we're going to do is shutdown his entire computer—while he's still working on it. We can do that by typing shutdown at the meterpreter prompt.

• shutdown

As you can see above, his Windows 7 machine has shutdown inexplicably. I think we have him beginning to wonder whether his computer is haunted!

Step 3: Return from the Dead

He has probably now called in IT tech support and they have re-assured him that "nothing is wrong," but in the back of his mind he is thinking otherwise. All these strange occurrences are leading him to believe that his computer is possessed!

If he isn't wondering now whether his computer is haunted, he certainly will be after this step. What we're going to do is send him a message from that fired employee through Notepad and have it pop up on his desktop.

First we need to edit a file. Since we shutdown his system, we will need to once again exploit his machine and get a new meterpreter prompt.

Now that we're back into his machine, we can use the meterpreter edit command to edit a file. We can choose any file on his computer and open and edit it. I found a file named "topsecret.txt" and I'm going to edit it with a message from the fired employee.

The edit command in the meterpreter opens a file with the vim text editor.

• edit topsecret.txt

Now, we can delete the information in his topsecret.txt file and fill it with a message from the fired employee.

Next, we save the file and rename it "haunted.txt".

Now we want this file to pop on his desktop. We can do this by opening a command prompt by typing shell at the meterpreter prompt. This takes us to the command prompt on his machine.

• shell

With a command prompt, we start Notepad with our edited file by typing:

• notepad haunted.txt

As you can see below, our message to the boss will suddenly pop up on his desktop! Now he is certain his system is possessed!

I hope you had a little fun with this tutorial and we'll be doing more Metasploit and more hacking in the near future, so keep coming back!

Skull keyboard and skeleton ghost images via Shuttertock