The (rather annoying and arrogant) sales manager who kept complaining about the speed of his laptop eventually sent it to us to have a look. As part of the troubleshooting, I looked at his Internet browsing history. Completely empty. Curiosity piqued now, I looked at the Internet cache - full of pr0n, so a word to my boss who said that we had no option but to report him to HR. Who made him an ex-sales manager. And, yes, he had signed an Internet usage form and he also denied looking at the pr0n.

P.S. we have Regomized as "Jones" Don't panic, I see what you did there, well done.

Many years ago, I worked in the computing department of a university. A chunk of the estate was Solaris, with automounted shares from various servers to the desktops that some of the researchers used. Shares included a central /usr/local/bin for distributing software, home directories, web server content, etc.

At some point I became aware that the web server share was rather more full than I'd been expecting, this being the days when web pages and images were generally fairly small. After digging through with "du", I found a folder owned by one of the researchers containing many pictures of women without much in the way of clothing... Nuked the folder and left a README.TXT file which said something like "who's been a naughty boy?" and chown'd it to his ID.

The folder and README were gone 2 days later...

What got me about this was that he had a workstation on his desk which had a decent sized home directory for his own use; a directory I'd almost certainly never have found anything in without specifically needing to check. If he'd kept his porn stash there, it would likely never have been found...

So often, it's the overly-complex hiding the tracks that gets people caught.

There was a manager at a big insurer (er, let's call them Celtic Bereaved) back in the 90s who was just writing himself cheques from the company, and approving them. Due to the volume of cheques moving around and the trusted (at the time) position he was in, this wasn't caught, and the final investigation confirmed that if he'd just kept doing that he'd never have been caught! If nothing else, these payments were so regular that anyone who might process them would just see them as "another one of those" - completely routine, and not suspicious.

What got him caught was he started moving money around between other accounts to 'disguise' the payments, and one day one of these cover payments attracted a desk jockey's attention as being a bit odd, asked a few questions and before you knew it, manager's in handcuffs and the board are setting up a team specifically to audit managers who have the authority to both raise and approve payments.

As a junior academic, but with some IT skills, I was once given the task of determining whether our senior IT technician, who had been caught 'red-handed' watching porn, had downloaded or viewed any illegal material. This was a very strange task, but the strangest, and hardest (not intended as ooh-err-missus) part was that I was expected to write a report for the Head of Department describing exactly what sort of things he had been watching even if they were not illegal. A rather tricky assignment, and I was never quite clear why the non-illegal material had to be desired in detail!

So... For a brief time, it was actually your job to watch somebody else's playlist of porn?

Sounds horrible.

An associate once set up a small 'red & black' computer unit in a war zone. The red and black machines were of course electronically and electrically isolated and the statutory distance apart. He returned a couple months later to find a USB stick suspended from the ceiling between the two machines on a length of elastic.

I've only found dodgy material once on a work machine, but then I don't normally go looking for it. As the person had already left the company there wasn't much I could do except report it to HR and delete it.

I did hear a story, which may or may not be true, from the early days of CD writers. The evening shift lab tech at one of the UK's nuclear establishments was spending most of his time duplicating dodgy material for sale.

At work, one of the printers had a paper jam. I cleared it, and it started printing its backlog. One of the documents looked like a list of porn sites. I took it to my manager who dealt with it. The offender was called in, and denied all knowledge of the document. The manager said he would call the IT department to scan the computer for this document, or any other suspicious documents. Suddenly the offender decided it might be better if he took early retirement.

I was in my office one day circa 2001, and "someone" came in and put a Zip disk (remember them?) into the drive of a computer used by someone who wasn't in that day. Then went back to their own desk.

Then I noticed the activity light flashing a lot, and being a nosy bugger (and not trusting this person a jot), I opened Windows Explorer and went to the Zip drive, and found that the disk was filling up with images of women who had clearly gotten too warm, and decided to remove all their clothing.

Screenshots were duly taken (of filenames, not the images), and information sent to HR & Management, whereupon the user in question claimed that he was "copying it for a friend who didn't have internet access). Management then decided that even though there was a precedent of sacking people caught doing this kind of thing, that he merely merited a warning.

[1]Every single time when someone told me their computer is slow

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/605/041/dd7.jpg

If you're really lucky, [1]there's a member of the board handy when you find something interesting .

I always enjoyed explaining access and audit logs to people hitherto unaware of their role or indeed their existence.

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/04/03/on_call/#c_4007629

But not the punishment