Teach your co-workers to lock their PCs with the help of a harmless prank!

The goal of this is to teach your co-workers to be more security conscious and LOCK THEIR PC when they walk away from their desk.  Locking your PC stops unauthorized people from accessing your PC, viewing a document that has sensitive data, AND playing a prank such as THIS!  This is especially important when you have access to sensitive data, or better yet, administrative rights!

My coworker, @bspagna, came across a LinkedIn Blog post and we started doing this almost immediately!.  In short, when someone walks away and doesn’t lock their PC, change their background to an image of Justin Bieber!

Do You Have A Bieber Policy?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-you-have-bieber-policy-douglas-brush

I’ve done it to a few of my coworkers, and it takes time to go to open a browser, search for Justin Bieber pictures, download one, set the background, etc.  If you all know me, you know I had to come up with a way to automate this!  I found a script to change the user’s wallpaper to an image and modified it to do so from a file I stored on a network drive!  We have shared network drives that map for everyone, which made this very easy to do.  If you don’t have shared drives, you could add a section to map a drive, copy the file locally, and then disconnect the drive. I’ll add that section separately.  I store the script CMD file AND the jpg in the same location to make for easy implementation.


@Echo Off
REM ######################################
REM #
REM # Script to change Wallpaper
REM # Written by BLiebowitz on 10/12/2017
REM #
REM ####################################

copy z:\bieber.jpg c:\users\%username%\pictures
dim shell dim user
Set shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") user = shell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%USERNAME%")
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
windowsDir = fso.GetSpecialFolder(0) wallpaper = "c:\users\%username%\pictures\bieber.jpg"
shell.RegWrite "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper", wallpaper
shell.Run "%windowsDir%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE user32.dll,UpdatePerUserSystemParameters", 1, True

Map Network Drive Commands are below.  The mapped drive command will prompt for your PW.  I put /user as I assume the user you’re doing this to may not have access to the share.  Though, you could setup a share just for this on your PC or a server and set it to have everyone read permissions for easy deployment. 🙂

net use z: \\server\share /user:domain\username *
copy z:\bieber.jpg c:\users\%username%\pictures
net use z: /delete

Here is the image I use.  It seems perfect for this function.  He’s almost pointing at you like, “You should have locked your PC!”

Here are some images I feel would be good “I TOLD YOU SO” wallpapers!…

One of my colleagues even left Justin Bieber as his background to REMIND himself to lock his PC. 🙂

Implement a Bieber Policy at your office TODAY!

Do you do something similar, but with a different image?  Leave a comment and let me know!

Ben Liebowitz, VCP, vExpert
NJ VMUG Leader

 

 

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