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Our head of cybersecurity was a complete psychopath who installed a hidden program that would hijack anyone's webcam for exactly three seconds and take a photo whenever they typed their password wrong three times. He called it "Project Mugshot" and stored all the photos in a secret folder labeled "Wall of Shame." Only me and this other dev knew about it because we accidentally found the folder during a routine server cleanup.

For two years, this maniac was secretly photographing people's frustrated faces every time they screwed up their passwords. We're talking hundreds of photos—people picking their noses, yawning, making weird faces, completely unaware they were being photographed. The folder was organized by department with timestamps. Accounting had the most photos because they're apparently terrible at remembering passwords.

The whole thing was insane, but we kept quiet because this guy was basically untouchable—he had dirt on everyone and reported directly to the CEO. Plus, technically, the webcam access was buried in some security policy nobody read, so it wasn't exactly illegal.

Everything went nuclear during our biggest client presentation of the year. We're talking about a $50 million contract with representatives from three different companies, our entire C-suite, and about forty people crammed into our main conference room. The presentation was being livestreamed to their overseas offices, so we had cameras everywhere and everything was being recorded.

Our VP of Sales was running the demo on his laptop connected to the main projector. Halfway through, he needed to log into our client portal to show some analytics. He's nervous, types his password wrong. Tries again—wrong. Third time—wrong again.

CLICK. His webcam activates for three seconds.

But here's where it gets absolutely insane. The laptop was connected to the projector, and somehow the webcam feed got routed to the main display instead of just taking a silent photo. So for three seconds, everyone in that room—and everyone watching the livestream—got a full-screen, high-definition view of our VP picking his nose while staring at his laptop screen.

Dead silence. Forty people just witnessed our VP of Sales mining for gold on a 90-inch display during a $50 million presentation. The client representatives are looking at each other like "What the hell kind of company is this?" Our CEO's face went from confused to absolutely murderous in about two seconds.

The VP is frantically trying to explain that his computer "malfunctioned," but nobody's buying it because who the hell has a webcam that randomly activates and broadcasts to projectors? Meanwhile, I'm in the back of the room having a full panic attack because I know exactly what happened and I'm about to get fired.

The meeting got postponed "due to technical difficulties." Within an hour, our CEO had the entire IT department in his office demanding answers. The cybersecurity head tried to play dumb, but our CEO wasn't having it. He brought in an external forensics team that afternoon.

They found everything. The secret folder, the photos, the code, the logs—everything. Turns out our "security expert" had been running his own personal surveillance operation for two years. The forensics team found over 3,000 photos of employees, including some pretty compromising shots of people in various states of undress who worked from home.

The cybersecurity head got fired immediately and escorted out by actual police because some of the photos crossed into illegal territory. The company had to hire a crisis management firm, send out legal notices to every employee, and we lost the $50 million contract because the client thought we were running some kind of spy operation.

The whole thing cost the company over $2 million in legal fees, lost contracts, and settlements.