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I Rick Rolled my entire school this way. Write a program that maxed the volume and held it there at 100%, minimised all open windows, downloaded a photo of Rick Astley and set it as your wallpaper, then started playing Never Gonna Give You Up. The only way to stop it was to power off the computer or wait the song out, then manually fix your wallpaper.
I saved the executable in a publically accessible location on the school’s server that I shouldn’t have had write access to, and sent a cleverly disguised link to a mate. He thought it was hilarious, and forwarded the email to a dozen of his mates. They forwarded it to all their mates, and pretty soon no teacher could go 60 seconds without another one of their students’ laptops interrupting the class at max volume.
Best bit? I “taught a valuable lesson in cybersecurity” and didn’t get in (much) trouble!!
I’m still irritated about when I was a youth I found a somewhat obvious security hole, and took advantage of it in a mildly funny way, the staff just punished me.
You weren’t supposed to be able to change the desktop background, but for some reason MS Paint had a “set to background” option that worked. So I set the background to a screenshot of the desktop, and then hid all the icons and start menu. Later, the teacher thought the computer was broken because “nothing was working”.
I think it could’ve been a good teaching moment. A talk about not messing shared resources up, and channel my interests somewhere productive. Nope. Just a lecture and week long library ban. Disappointed.
I created something really similar, but instead it was a random shock site. Also, some files stayed in between sessions and some other students put DOTA executables there. We replaced that executable with the virus 😈
A screamer virus could bring the world to its knees.
I was in college during the years leading up to y2k and supported myself at the time getting IT infrastructure ready. Some friends and I decided to write a “virus” that, on bootup, checks to see if the current date is in the first week of January 2000 and if it is and a backup of the fonts is not found (so it’ll only run once) then it’ll back up your fonts and alter the originals to replace the y character with the k. This affected everything system wide.
That created more chaos than anticipated.
We used to edit the system keymapping on the school Macintoshes and duplicate a letter somewhere, and then we’d do the same to a second machine using the letter that the first could no longer type; then we’d switch the physical keycaps
kou know, to this dak i alwask wondered whk my computer alwaks did that. kou wilk rascal, kou!
I’m sorry, I don’t speak Dutch.
Kanker lekker
y2k
replace the y character with the k
I see what you did there
I’m dumb and/or stoned. Can you explain please? Shk gkpsk, slklk, sprklk, trkst bk mk crkpt?
Y to k Y 2 k
Koure missing an a in sparklk
Mk bad tkvm
sounds like something I’d see on dancoot1
I had one guy I’m the late 90s at my HS who made a program that copied itself onto every directory on the computer at startup. It was a .com file and if you tried to run it it would use the PC speakers and play an tone increasing in volume and pitch until it was unbearable. You had to do a hard boot to end it.
I also remember the Form virus that made the PC speakers make a sound each time you pressed a key. Can’t remember I’d it did anything else.
albanian virus.
Much better than A Serbian Virus.
Simple, every now and again switch a key input with a neighboring key. Imagine slowly losing your confidence in your motor skills as you just can’t seem to type properly no matter how careful you are.
It would do it like once every 10-1000 minutes, you will never catch it and slowly lose your grip on reality.
Excuse me sir, they said “harmless”
I swapped the N and M keys on a co-worker’s keyboard and even made a custom keyboard mapping for it as well.
That’s nasty
I call bullshit. In the 90s you had to turn a phisical wheel to increase the volume of the computer.
I still can, rocking the Logitech Z5500s that I bought close to 20 years ago now. Absolutely the Pinnacle of PC speakers.
As someone caught out by this, most of us had speakers and windows had volume controls as well. They’re kinda useless to have super low volume, so the tendency was to turn the speakers up and have windows control it. (what could go wrong? mine was always set low in windows, this was before lots of ads on browsers would randomly come on too) Fortunately everyone thought it was the guy in the cubicle next to me, with about 10-15 heads popping out of cubicles in our direction.
And for what it’s worth the audio clip finished with an enthusiastic “YEE HAW”
Right it was like those jumps are sites where it would play something very quietly so you’d turn up the volume, then they would announce the porn at full volume. It was a gag site/video file, not a virus.
used to be fun at the office to take a screenshot of someone desktop, and make it the desktop background, then put all their icons into one folder.
Classic prank. I’ve done this before.
- Screenshot of desktop
- Flip 180°
- Set as desktop background
- Right-click desktop -> Hide Desktop Icons
Edit: Markdown is dumb
Did this to my brother once but i screenshotted the desktop with a webpage open on some dodgey porn site. It was not a maximised window so you could see the desktop making it seem more legitimate.
Flip the screenshot 180°, but then also flip the display output 180°, so it looks all normal, except the cursor movement is “inverted”.
A virus that changes Windows’ sticky keys to only requiring two taps of the shift key.
Not so harmless to the guy living in Iran that got stoned.
I used to make a batch file that opened a command prompt that opened the batch file again and again and put it on the computers as the internet Explorer logo.
People would get so mad when they opened it as a cascade of cmd would open until the computer crashed
So something like that i think
Sounds like a weak fork bomb.
In a programming class, one of my professors sometimes remolety opened the xeyes program (Linux program that opens a pair of eyes that follow your cursor) on students that were not paying a lot of attention.
I used to do the same thing to a few people back in the day. Linux distros used to ship with the X listening port just conveniently wide open and the config set to allow input from any other device on the LAN. I’d start with only one xeyes, and then they’d close it. I’d do it a few more times until they got irritated with me, and then I’d push it further by putting xeyes into a bash loop to open dozens at a time.
I used to operate a dashboard on a wall-monitor in an IT ops center. For Halloween, I wrote a script that very briefly played a video of a creepy set of eyes that opened, looked around the room, focused on something/glared, then closed, all over around like 2 seconds, but ran 1-3 times an hour. It was funny the first few times it happened and I got told to turn it off.
Instead I changed it to run 1-3 times a year.
My manager thought that that was absolutely hilarious without being too disruptive and let me keep it. We had enough turnover that there was always a newbie in the pool and every now and then, someone would say ‘what the fuck was that!?’ and we’d get a good laugh.
Thank you, I have wondered why xeyes existed for the last 28 years.
It wasn’t a file, it was a webpage. And it loaded infinite popups showing a dude’s gaping anus, turned the volume up to 100%, and played a loop of “Hey everyone, I’m looking at gay porno!”
goatse
I did this in high school, it was just a basic script that spawned a warning dialog box (the kind thats always on top) that just said you can’t close this, part of the script action was making tge task scheduler check every few seconds if the script was running… If it wasn’t then run it.
Since I was making the task scheduler do the checking it meant even if you tried to task manager force close the script it would just open again in a few seconds, it was not a permanent task it was a temporary one and every opening of the script would reset that task so basically the only way to get rid of it was to restart the computer as that would clear the task.
How about a programm which screams “aaaaaaa” after you unlock your screen. Barely hearable at first and it gets louder with every minute. People who don’t know how to remove it would have to lock and unlock their screens every 5 minutes or so.
