A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to “Slackbot” and remained undetected for months

Apparently hiding in Slack isn't that hard; You just have to pretend that you are a robot. That's what IT drinkAs did Tom McKay when he left Gizmodo In 2022, the site administration did not discover it for several months.

In a post on XMcKay shared some screenshots of the new “Slackbot” persona he took on after officially leaving Gizmodo. He also emphasized the edge That this ridiculous prank actually happened.

If you're not stuck using Slack for most of the day like me, you probably don't know that Slackbot is the friendly bot that lives in the messaging service. It helps you do things like set reminders, find out your office Wi-Fi password, or tell you when you're mentioned in a channel you're not part of.

When it was time for him to leave, McKay replaced his current profile picture with one that resembled an angry version of Actual Slackbot code. He also changed his name to “Slackbot”. By the way, you can't change your name on Slack to “Slackbot”, as the service will tell you that this name is already taken. He. She Do It works if you use a special character that resembles one of the characters within Slackbot, Like replacement “o” with the Unicode character “о.”

The move camouflaged McKay's active Slack account for several months, allowing his account to evade deletion. It also allowed him to send bot-like messages to colleagues, such as “Slackbot Fact of the Day: Hi, I'm Slackbot! This is a fact. Have a peaceful day!” My colleague Victoria Song, who previously worked at Gizmodowasn't entirely surprised by the revelation, saying, “As Tom's former coworker and G/O Media survivor, this tracks.”

of course not all The company will fall victim to this scam, as some have security measures in place to prevent this kind of thing. But maybe GizmodoMcKay's management believed that McKay's account had already been deleted. Or maybe they weren't keen-eyed enough to spot a Slackbot duplicate with a pair of suspicious eyebrows.