Mind you, in 2002 no called, and I got a free shirt and a folding chair.
I managed to get a phone call and a personal visit from a script.
Much less interesting than it sounds: I was downloading satellite data from NASA, the increased bandwidth use worried the sysadmin in my research lab, and we each had landline phones on our desks because this was the mid-noughties.
A couple of takeaways:
a. Credit Suisse did not have a username / password to log in. They were using "security by obscurity" in 1980.
b. The local FBI guys in Dallas didn't know you could purchase a modem for a couple hundred bux and hook it up to a $1000 personal computer. They seemed truly surprised to discover I wasn't part of a well-funded white collar crime syndicate and just a kid in jr. high school whose parents eventually gave in when I begged for a modem for a couple months.
c. You can apparently do damage to your reputation at 300 baud.
The lesson I learned was to do a better job of covering my tracks. But I stayed away from that mainframe after that.
The things many of us did to learn about computers back then would get someone prison time today.
My supervisor got the next month's TSO departmental chargeback bill for my user account from the University's IT group, and it was tens of thousands of dollars of TSO time :). They told me "don't do that anymore"
Truly better than any prize. I got a similar letter from my school's headteacher after some extracurricular IT shenanigans. I'm still proud of that one.
It took me a lot of restraint not to harvest everyone's usernames (which was just the name of the home directory easily grokked) and email everyone at username@highered.edu (since sendmail was also available) something silly during winter break- like the fact that flooding had happened in the dorm rooms, and that everyone would have to move out before Spring semester due to needed maintenance and everyone will receive $500 in compensation because everyone's stuff in their dorm was destroyed.
Surely I would have been expelled, but what a story to tell my next employer.
Anyways, looking for a QA job if anyone's hiring. I would like to break your stuff.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010223090106/http://cokeauctio...
This worked for a short time. Then my account disappeared with all my (very hard earned) credits in it. Then I received a letter from the MD of Coke UK telling me I was a very naughty boy.