Former Gizmodo Writer Changed Name To 'Slackbot,' Stayed Undetected For Months

Tom McKay successfully masqueraded as a 'Slackbot' on Slack after leaving Gizmodo in 2022, going unnoticed by the site's management for several months. The Verge reports: If you're not glued to Slack for most of the day like I am, then you might not know that Slackbot is the friendly robot that lives in the messaging service. It helps you do things like set reminders, find out your office's Wi-Fi password, or let you know when you've been mentioned in a channel that you're not a part of. When it was his time to leave, McKay swapped out his existing profile picture for one that resembled an angrier version of Slackbot's actual icon. He also changed his name to 'Slackbot.' You can't just change your name on Slack to 'Slackbot,' by the way, as the service will tell you that name's already been taken. It does work if you use a special character that resembles one of the letters inside Slackbot, though, such as replacing 'o' with the Unicode character 'o.'

The move camouflaged McKay's active Slack account for months, letting his account evade deletion. It also allowed him to send bot-like messages to his colleagues such as, 'Slackbot fact of the day: Hi, I'm Slackbot! That's a fact. Have a Slack-ly day!' My colleague Victoria Song, who previously worked at Gizmodo, isn't all that surprised that this situation unfolded, and says, 'As Tom's former coworker and a G/O Media survivor, this tracks.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.