I don’t think I’ve had any particularly bad ones. In fact I don’t remember having any since my age was in the single digits tbh. The only time I remember having malware was once when I tried to install iTunes on Windows for some reason, and I got infected with some kind of malware from trying to download this. I don’t remember what exactly it did—I think it was just adware that interacted with your browser, nothing too crazy. I think I may have done a fresh install or factory reset to get rid of it. I was really young at the time and I don’t recall getting malware since. I’ve definitely never (consciously) experienced malware on Linux, yet. (I say consciously cause for all I know maybe someone’s bugged me with a keylogger I’ve not detected idk. Hope not!)
I don’t know if this applies directly, but in my early days of hosting a server for fun, I installed a telnet server because my phone didn’t have SSH at the time. I forgot to close it when i was done and someone got in and installed a password sniffer. This was a Slackware box, IIRC. My only indication that there was a problem was that the “.” & “…” directories didn’t appear from an “ls -Alf”. I pulled the network cable and booted to a boot image and discovered that many key system utilities were replaced with imposters that would mask that there was an intruder. The '“ps”, “ls” and other utils were symlinked to the “…” dir in /usr/local/lib.
I didn’t trust anything on that server and nuked it. Now, anything that’s internet facing is built from ansible and the config is stored in a repo and the repo is backed up on a drive that’s physically disconnected except when backing up. I’ve messed up the initrd from time to time and it’s usuall easier for me to reimage than try to fix it.
Your PC is now Stoned.
This thing is from 1987 and I still have it on some of my old floppies.
That one time back, from so long ago, when I was less techy than 2024 me, when everytime I opened my old Android phone, the browser would open up a Thai porn site. I went to the applications list on that old phone, and found an empty app with no icon and uninstalled it, and it stopped happening.
Was installing Windows XP and forgot to unplug the computer from the internet. It got a virus during install.
How 😭
XP didn’t have built-in virus protection, you had to install anti-virus once you got to the XP desktop. But, as I found out, during setup XP was talking to the Internet and vulnerable to infection.
WinXP has had a long time on the shelf, it’s EOL so it’s not getting updated, and it’s still occasionally in use by businesses - when true, usually on critical infrastructure pieces that they can’t afford to take down to swap to a newer machine. People know this and so XP is a malware magnet. There are about a gorillion scripts loose in the wild that just find IP addresses at random - or not random - and hammer them with a bouquet of exploits, almost all of which will be easily fended off by a modern updated system, but several of which XP is probably vulnerable to.
So, the second you have a functioning network driver and complete your handshake with the internet, chances are good that somebody will be trying to sneak a script up your ass to corrupt the system. I’ve never seen it happen during install but if you’re exceptionally unlucky I could see how it could be possible.
Don’t remember how it happened but when I was a kid I got this virus on my laptop that would randomly open hundreds of Firefox tabs with this picture of Jeff the killer, with screaming audio at maximum volume and flashing black and white so fast it def would have killed an epileptic. Probably the most scared I’d ever been at that point. It also turned on my webcam light every time it happened, so somewhere on some filthy shut ins hard drive is a video of me at 12 years old throwing my laptop
Reminds me of that one time someone on some forum linked to a Jeff The Killer screamer site (basically the same thing you’ve described) and I clicked on it.
It initially didn’t even work, because I was using NoScript at the time… So I disabled NoScript temporarily and refreshed the page. It being about 2 in the morning and the speakers being tuned up didn’t help.
Got something installed in the earlier days of the web that would hijack the screen. I was able to identify the process in the task manager and delete it before it could replicate again
Pop ups in early to mid '00s
Oy virus I ever got was pespaces back in the 95 days it was a hard mess to clean up mainly because it infected every single exe file and broke a lot of them.
Kinda remember cleaning it up from a dos floppy then once clean basically reinstalling every broken program one at a time.
In hindsight I should have just done a fresh install but I was new to computers.
Worst experience. Fairly new at a dotcom and moving from the satellite office to the big-time (same building as these loosers who were trying to do DVDs by mail, LOL ;-) and getting the shown around and introduced to various department heads.
Met the VP of IT and Sr. Systems admin, joked that it looked like they lived there… found out they had been battling a nasty virus all weekend that had infected most of our desktops and was evading our standard AV package, it was taking several runs of a special cleaner or just a wipe/reinstall.
Got introduced to lots of other folks, learned many more things, almost entirely forgot about the virus. A few hours later I’m waiting for my boss to finish a “quick” meeting I wasn’t invited to and getting bored. But I want to seem like a responsible employee (and I was caught up with /. from earlier in the day) so I decided to log in and check my email.
And the inbox boings start. Don’t even have a functioning desktop yet and I can literally hear the virus spreading across the office. I’d manage to pick an old desktop in the IT area that hadn’t been cleaned yet. Fortunately a lot of computers were still off from the cleanup effort, so my fuckup was limited to a 6-7 systems, but that was still hours of additional work for the small IT team after they had already given up their weekend.
It’s definitely not the worst virus I’ve ever had to deal with with. But it was definitely the most visible/shameful virus related fuckup I’ve ever been responsible for.
God, I remember how when I was like 8 years old I infected the home computer with a super annoying Adware.
I have no idea how it got in, if I was just hanging out on the Cartoon Network site playing games, but it happened, it was horrible. Every time I turned on the computer it played a video of a woman talking in a strange language and advertising something I don’t remember what it was. I think in the end they had to format the hard drive, that’s how insidious that shit was.
Another vaguely related event is when I supposedly messed up my mother’s first laptop by downloading music from Ares. I say “supposedly” because I doubt it was because of that, but because I was taking a bath while I was handling it. My mother loves to talk about it every time she hears the phrase “Computer Virus”.
Had a fun experience in the back then times that my father’s computer became infected with one of those nineties style “funny guy” viruses. You know the ones, the ones that seem less interested in stealing money and doing damage and more interested in just fucking with you.
Of note:
- if you tried to open Mozilla Firefox it’d autokill it and pop a message saying “use IE or else”
- if you tried loading up Orkut (look, we were Brazilians in the early aughts. We all used Orkut) it’d kill your browser saying orkut was banned from that PC
- it’d occasionally pop up messages with rude text seemingly at random
Lol
Whoever wrote that malware is definitely going to Brazil.
Some time around 2010 or so I found a FREE DOWNLOAD for some software I wanted on Youtube. Normally I wouldn’t fall for such a thing, and the video had a huge amount of likes and a basically no dislikes so I thought it was legit (I wasn’t well-acquainted with the concept of view bots). Ended up with some nasty malware, had to reinstall. Don’t run executables off youtube, kids.
Turns out being paranoid about computer security when you are completely computer illiterate is a perfect way to get malware.
Very true
Personal: Booted up a friend’s infected disk on my Amiga, which then infected the HD. Mass panic for ten minutes or so as I ran Virus Checker or VirusZ on it.
Work: In 2003-ish we had an infection of… I can’t even remember the name of it, but we had to manually go round and run a program on everybody’s computer to get rid of it.
Since then I’ve seen a few people get their files encrypted by Ransomware, but no major infections.
Mine is quite tame. I accidentally unleashed the conficker worm on an org.
Had to patch about 1000 PCs across Australia to clean it up and that was a royal pain downloading windows updates over dialup.
Yes, we were still using dialup in Australia around that time and no we didn’t have wsus either.
We got Sality. Huge PITA to remove.
