Apparently, hiding in Slack isn’t that hard; you just have to pretend to be a bot. that’s it IT Brew‘s Tom McKay did when he left Gizmodo In 2022, and it went undetected by site management for months.
In an article on XMcKay shared some screenshots of the new “Slackbot” persona he took on after officially leaving. Gizmodo. He also confirmed The Verge that this stupid game really happened.
If you’re not connected to Slack most of the day like I am, you might not know that Slackbot is the friendly robot that lives on the messaging service. It helps you do things like set reminders, find your office Wi-Fi password, or notify you when you’re mentioned in a channel you’re not a member of.
When it was time to leave, McKay changed his existing profile picture to one that looked like an angrier version. A true icon of Slackbot. It also changed its name to “Slackbot”. By the way, you can’t just change your name in Slack to “Slackbot” because the service will tell you that the name is already taken. He does Work if you use a special character that looks like one of the letters inside Slackbot, as a replacement Unicode character “o”.
This move camouflaged McKay’s active Slack account for months and allowed him to evade account deletion. It also allows him to tell his colleagues, “Slackbot fact of the day: Hi, I’m a Slackbot! This is a fact. Have a peaceful day!” My former colleague Victoria Song Gizmodoit’s not all that surprising that this situation came up, saying, “As Tom’s former colleague and G/O Media survivor, it follows.”
Of course not each the company will fall for this trick because some have security measures to prevent such things. But maybe Gizmodo‘s management thought McKay’s account had already been deleted. Or maybe they weren’t eagle-eyed enough to spot a duplicate Slackbot with a suspicious pair of eyebrows.