this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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There have been one or two times in my IT career I've had to fix something and I didn't have a clue how the user figured out how to fuck it up that bad, because the exact steps were so batshit insane there was no way to predict anyone would ever take them without high expertise in the field.
This feels a little like that, but instead of "I ran this script I found and things went downhill from there", it's a guide to Baby's First Financial Fraud.
What happened in those one or two times? What were the batshit steps?
It was a long time ago and it's late so you get the one I remember best. This guy was older, and "a little technical" in the most dangerous way. He wanted to use his work laptop for personal browsing while he was on holiday, and he thought if he replaced the boot drive with a personal drive, he could get around all the group policy lockdowns.
Unfortunately our laptops had a security module, which would blow a fuse if you tried to boot with unrecognised hardware, and prevent the system from functioning until my team could service it and replace the board. He panicked when he put the official drive back in and it still didn't work, so he took it apart the rest of the way and started looking for the problem with a voltmeter. Eventually, he thought he'd found the problem fuse, found a local electrical hobby shop that carried an equivalent, and tried to replace it with a soldering iron.
When he brought it in, he tried to play dumb, but nothing he was saying was adding up. He told me the whole story after I wouldn't take his answers at face value and kept pushing for more details. If he hadn't, I don't think I'd have figured it all out. I didn't think he even had access to a torx-head screwdriver...
We are talking about Laptop mainboards with SMD parts right? Mad props for trying to replace a SMD fuse with a soldering iron.
He knew enough to know there was a fuse, but not enough to know which one it was or that most modern parts don't use BGA (edit: "most". There are still some on the market, I think?). It was a spectacular mess.
BGA would be even more trouble to manually manipulate. I kinda want to see a picture now of the repair attempt... :D