Last Tuesday, the IT helpdesk received a password reset request from an employee named Mark in the marketing department. The ticket itself seemed routine at first—Mark said he was locked out of his account after multiple failed login attempts and needed assistance resetting his password. Nothing unusual so far.
But when the technician checked the security logs, curiosity quickly replaced monotony. Someone—or something—had attempted to log in to Mark’s account using “tomato” as the username. Even more bizarre, the failed login attempts came from Mark’s desk IP and were logged at exactly 8:03 AM on a Tuesday morning.
The technician called Mark to understand what was going on. It turned out Mark had recently adopted a new “focus technique” to power through his workload: naming his office plants after computer terms and jokingly typing their names into the login screen during breaks. His prized desk plant was a tomato plant, which he called “Tomato,” and he admitted to once fooling around by attempting to enter “Tomato” both as his username and password just to see what would happen.
Apparently, Mark forgot he had tried this, and the repeated login failures eventually locked his account. The moral of the story? Phones and keyboards aren’t the only things hackers might try. Sometimes, it’s the tomato plant on your desk trying to gain access to the network—at least in spirit.
After resetting the password and reminding Mark that his plants aren’t authorized users (yet), the technician closed the ticket. As a bonus, IT jokingly added a note in the ticket system: “Tomato user attempts—Please water the plant, but don’t give it network credentials.”