Screensaver troll

My work colleagues pranked me but they reviled a security bug.

Both mate-screensaver and gnome-screensaver have a feature to leave a message on the lock screen. However it doesn’t leave an audit trail.

What happened was my work colleagues left a message saying: “you have been hacked”.

I login and see a notify-send message with no context and no way of knowing what triggered it.

Eventually I figured out the message must be local and I started questioning my colleagues. Once I found out the full story I was actually grateful because it helped my improve my security.

Disable the button on the lock screen using ini: /usr/share/mate-screensaver/lock-dialog-default.ui

Change the line <property name="visible">True</property> to <property name="visible">False</property> in the following block like so.

<child>
	<object class="GtkButton" id="auth-note-button">
		<property name="label" translatable="yes">_Leave Message</property>
		<property name="visible">False</property>
		<property name="can_focus">True</property>
		<property name="focus_on_click">False</property>
		<property name="can_default">True</property>
		<property name="receives_default">False</property>
		<property name="use_underline">True</property>
	</object>
	<packing>
		<property name="expand">False</property>
		<property name="fill">False</property>
		<property name="position">0</property>
	</packing>
</child>