John Vanderaart column Teams hacked

I work in a hybrid development team and then Teams – from Microsoft – is very useful. In any case, to allow the on-the-job workers and the consciously-home workers to communicate in a targeted manner. Nowadays, that is not unusual and in our practice it works very well. So far, so good… In the meantime, we had agreed to be present at the office at the same time together at least one day a week. Yes, everyone unanimously agreed on that! If it were not for the fact that we (independently of each other) were denied access to the office. We have to ‘log in’ with a ‘droplet’ and that suddenly was no longer possible. The key (which we have as bypass) would not turn: “Lock completely blocked.” Only much later did we hear that an emergency battery had probably burst, but in the meantime: “Door completely closed.” I made a virtue of necessity by visiting a nearby coffee shop. At 9:00 sharp, Teams started screaming. One colleague was already home, another colleague turned around in the car, another was doing some shopping at the Vomar, and so on. In the absence of up-to-date company information, we decided to move forward to a less technical meeting. So nothing to worry about… Around 11:20, the redeeming phone call: “That burst emergency battery.” But something that no one (except for a smart helpdesk employee) had come up with in the meantime: “The key to the front door also worked on the emergency door…” Our entire development team agreed on that: “Now that’s a real hack!”

Cost: “A few tens of euros…” But sometimes essential.