yeah, the other day i was supposed to remove a restriction from a router that was some custom thing built on a raspberry pi. i logged in, started messing around, trying to figure out the system, and of course i looked at bash_history because why not, i'm unfamiliar with the setup so it seemed like a good place to start. up until i found some commands editing it. so i'm like

$ export HISTFILE=/dev/null # alright, two can play this game

it ended up being a simply cron job that runs a script that starts and stops hostapd every once in a while. i didn't disable the cron job, i just commented out a critical line from the stop script. happy debugging to the sysadmin, lol