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

TBH I never had one

Was installing Windows XP and forgot to unplug the computer from the internet. It got a virus during install.

Pop ups in early to mid '00s

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.

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”.

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!)

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.

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.

The one where they installed a remote access script on a workstation, waited for 6 months before spending all of 5 minutes bypassing a few layers of security products, gaining domain admin, and then exfiltrating 3 docs relating to a Russian dude’s trial from like 6 years prior.

I regularly infect other peoples Laptops, and my own VMs as well, with a very common Spyware/Adware/Trojan. It comes in two different versions, the newer one being much more aggressive than the older one. It’s a ‘premium’ product costing up to $250 officially. The only way to really get rid of it is a full disk clean, otherwise it hides itself into separate, hidden partitions. It IS very annoying to install, considering it’s very slow, buggy and needs a terminal to circumvent the online account (even more tracking, technically, but I don’t want to create an account myself). And it even crashes all the time, takes ages to update and is a magnet for other viruses. I myself of course don’t have it, i use Linux after all. But most people seem to like Windows, for some reason, so I have to install it for them.

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.

0KB? Anyone?

Explanation:

Zero kb deletes all files in your home directory, replacing each and every one of them with a shortcut of size “0 kb”