obnoxious virus

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.

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.
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?
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
sounds like something I'd see on dancoot1

I had a boss that wasn't exactly technical. I wrote a power shell program that would randomly every 5-30 minutes give a pop-up that said "good job", which he always said regardless of what was going on. Placed it in his startup folder on his machine. I thought he would figure it out and tell me to knock it off.... Well I forgot about it, 9 months later during my annual performance review it popped up while I was looking at his screen. He apologized and just alt tabbed it away.

I offered to take a look and see if I couldn't stop it, and he said yes and then walked away to take a break. I then deleted the script I put on there. He gave me extra performance points (meaning a higher pay raise.)

Good job.

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.
- Disappointed!
- the mistake there is expecting the education system to focus on actually make an effort to teach kids guided by their individual qualities rather than reward/punish everyone that doesnt fit the cost-effective and efficient mold
  wouldnt want to treat schools as anything other than a business nor pay teachers appropriate wages, now would we?
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 😈

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.

Thank you, I have wondered why xeyes existed for the last 28 years.
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.
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 wrote a simple script once that ran in the background and all it did was toggle the state of the caps lock key every 30 minutes. I set it up on a co-worker's computer as a scheduled task for an April Fools prank one year. I thought for sure he'd figure it out pretty quickly, but by mid-day, he had completely disassembled his keyboard, convinced the button was getting stuck due to gunk buildup. Eventually I ended up just disabling the task so he thought he had managed to fix it himself.

Did you ever tell him?
I dumped a batch script into a dev’s startup folder that would draw the text effect from The Matrix all over the screen. I thought he’d immediately catch on but apparently he stood up and started yelling about his workstation being hacked.
Set it to run on boot, I hope.

Oh, I have a seemingly harmless idea so evil, it will ruin the internet forever.
I will make it so every time you open any website, there will be a popup with a question that asks you to invade your privacy, and you can allow it to do so with one click, but you will have to dig through menus if you want to avoid it. Then, after some seconds, another popup will appear, asking you to create a login, no matter what you do. Then, it randomly will ask you to share your location. Yes, with a popup again. Then, just as you thought you're done, another window will open, grabbing your focus, which will demand you talk to a chatbot, and you can't close this one, only slightly minimize it.

You should add one allowing this site that you've never been to before and don't even know yet if it's useful, to send you notifications.
Also, autoplaying videos that pop up in the lower corner of your screen. It has a clear, easy to click “X” button to close, but every 100 px you scroll triggers a re-check of the video window to ensure it’s still open and playing. If it’s been closed or stopped, the pop up window respawns and/or the video restarts.
How about wait until you're at the end of the article. But before you can read the last paragraph or two a pop up to ask if I want to join their mailing list or some crap.

I remember a harmless over that just randomly opened your CD tray while it ran. Called something like cup holder, or something like that.

Shit that was a long time ago...

If you rember that, it’s time to get your colonoscopy and prostate checked.
- ✅ Colonoscopy
  ⬜ Prostate exam
  I'm 40yo. I'm practically in the grave already!
- Uh oh, I can't find my prostate. I'll ask my gyno where it is on my next visit.
I wrote something like that back in HS and put it in the startup folder of every computer in our school library. I set it to wait about 10 minutes before opening the drive and then periodically after that

I had a friend who sent me a "Y2K fix" program back in '99. Said it would patch the error so I'd be safe. When I ran it, it swapped the letters Y and K on my keyboard.

That's hilarious
Well, I don't thiny that's verk funnk at all!

Three options come to mind.

A virus that adjusts your mouse sensitivity by like 5% every time you unlock your computer. Just enough that existing muscle memory is off, so you either have to adjust to the change or change it back every time.

A virus that installs and/or sets a similar but not quite right keyboard layout, and swaps to it randomly few boots. For example, setting the keyboard to Canadian Multilingual Standard instead of US English, where its only some of the punctuation keys that are changed.

A virus that randomly pops up a terminal window and outputs suspicious-looking text, and closes itself before the user has time to read it.

I swear my old computer already had that keyboard virus. POS was constantly trying to type French at me.
You are fucking devious. Mouse sensitivity/acceleration curve is my largest 'minor annoyance' between various machines/operating systems. Having that change on me randomly without changing systems would really mess with me.

Every time you log in, maximize a window, lock your PC, etc, your desktop icons randomly arrange themselves by penis. Open a folder, forced to display files as icons and arranged by penis. Try to view all your open windows on your desktop, you guessed it, penis.

No, no, change it back! I had internet explorer at the tip of penis
Chip, you can't arrange by penis
Just change it back okay
- For those who haven’t seen the masterpiece:
  https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE
  The whole thing is worth the watch but the reference is at (about) 7:50

There was a guy in my dorm who really didn't like his roommate. Really, really didn't like him. This was in the early aughts.

So one day he goes on his roommate's computer and puts a text file in his startup folder. The file says, "Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus!"

For context, Snood was a free video game people downloaded in the early aughts. Basically the same as Bust-A-Move, which probably doesn't clarify anything if you didn't already know what Snood is.

Anyway: "Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus! If you don't score [extremely difficult but not completely unrealistic high score] points, all of your files will be deleted!"

He laughed to himself and promptly forgot about it.

Weeks later, the roommate is on his computer in the middle of the night.

"What are you doing up? Go to bed."

"I can't. It's this stupid Snood virus."

I remember a more modern iteration of a virus that forces you to play an extremely hard game:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/rensenware-will-only-decrypt-files-if-victim-scores-2-billion-in-th12-game/
It demands a score of 200 million points in one of the hardest installments of Touhou on the highest difficulty. And 200M is pretty high, basically you need to finish all 6 stages and score reasonably well.
I only know about Snood because of a LGR video about it, I don't think that game ever reached Brazil

Autohotkey script that shuts the system down whenever someone types out certain key words. They of course include words related to looking up the issue like "help", "randomly", "virus" and so on. Not the most sophisticated but one I've actually done before.

Edit: Forgot to mention that ahk needs to be installed and the script must be placed in the autostart folder. Both can be achieved on a coworker's or family member's machine with a ducky usb stick.

Oooh, that's evil. You don't even need administrator privileges for that IIRC.
- As long as ahk can be installed and the autostart folder isn't locked it will work

Change the start menu search so instead of finding local applications and files, it searches the internet.
Would be even funnier if it used the worst search engine available.
Oh wait...

In the early 90s there was a virus going around that made the floppy drive's loading noises play the Imperial March.

No wonder people here keep talking about how awesome 90s internet was.
- No, you don't understand.
  The virus was distributed on a floppy disk with the Empire's logo printed on the label.
How about 512 floppy drives, 16 hard drives and 4 scanners?
https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY

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 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.

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.

Screenshot of desktop
Flip 180°
Set as desktop background
Right-click desktop -> Hide Desktop Icons
Edit: Markdown is dumb
Edit 2: Oh and hide the taskbar too
- 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".
Classic prank. I've done this before.

On somethingawful back in the day if you were on any one page on their forums for more then about 20 minutes, a audio clip would play that said something like "HEY EVERYBODY I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORNO"

I knew a guy who had a shitty boss so he set every key press and program function click (ok, cancel, etc.) to play that sound.

I don’t remember the details but my mom’s first cousin called me once to fix her computer when I was a teenager.

No matter what she typed it came out as, “I AM FUCKING GAY!”

Seems like all I had to do was type “stop”.

Uhh, it was "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno!" and then it proceeded to spawn hundreds of internet exploder windows pointing at goatse.cx. Thank God I was at home, alone, when it got me.

Yup, was gonna say the same thing. I liked the enthusiasm of the Hey Everybody guy!

Supposedly there was a DOS virus that would spawn a pacman that would eat your letters as you typed them.

The version I recall was once if those Flash animations with a cute squirrel or whatever saying something... but it was really quiet so you'd need to turn up the volume to hear. Then partway through it changed to sex stuff and blasted out in a voice like a monster truck announcer

"anal sex dot com, all anal, all the time!"

I have made some silly programs. One that moved the mouse pointer one pixel left, then down, right and up. It was quite annoying. Another that moved the mouse pointer when you reached the edge of the screen, touching the rightmost pixel row would move it to the left side of the screen and vice versa, same thing with top and bottom.

You basically invented the endless desktop functionality, lol

In my highschool programming class we made a TSR (in Borland pascal) that would change every 15th keypress to an "e". It wasn't self propagating, so it wasn't a virus per day, but it was highly annoying. It survived on memory after the netware logoff, and you could only get rid of it by rebooting.

We also had these everex brand 286 or 386 computers.... They had a little LCD screen that would read out what sector/track was being read on the disk. We found the memory address (80h) where we could write arbitrary text to the LCD. That was fun.

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.

While the computer is on, at random intervals, it shall play the sound of a smoke alarm's low battery beep using audio technology to make it sound like it's coming from somewhere else in your house.

albanian virus.

Much better than A Serbian Virus.

back when I was in school someone wrote a script that just openened the optical drive at random intervals and put it in the Autostart of every PC in the Comouter room

When I was in high school I made a .bat file that autoran when you put it in a device. All it would do is open the disc drive every 90 seconds however it did convince one teacher that she had a virus which caused giggles all around.

Whenever someone forgot to log out the terminal at university, we "fixed" their ".login" file by adding a command that listed all files, followed by a " ... deleted", and logging the user out again. One could easily see that the deletion was just fake, because the next time one logged in, all those files were listed again...
- That reminds me of how anyone could feel like a 1337 hacker if they run the tree command lol
I remember something like this being passed around as a "free coffee cup holder" - and when you ran it, all it would do was open your cd rom tray.

A screamer virus could bring the world to its knees.

On my dads computer, back in the day, I set the sound for every action in Windows to a silly song i downloaded off kazaa (Windows xp days, i believe)

So this was the sound that played for clicking the start menu, hovering over programs/apps, whatever it was and making that menu appear, and any sub menu for individual games or apps following that. Any kind of prompt like errors or "are you sures" etc, minimising/maximising a window. Everything!

That's what my virus would do. I just need the perfect sound to apply. Maybe that annoying tiktok song "Oh no! Oh no! Oh no no no no no!"

I shall write a virus that makes the computer play the "USB device detached" sound followed shortly by the "USB device attached" sound. Dee doo. Doo dee. Just that. three or four times a week.

Alt+Tab goes to a random window instead of being in the order of recency

A virus that changes Windows' sticky keys to only requiring two taps of the shift key.

«I’m watching porno» - not porn. This was around y2k

Finds anything and everything that can be set to dark mode and sets it back to light mode, but not while you're using it and not immediately.

Occasional mouse and keyboard lag up to 1 second.

Okay can I piss and moan about something tangentially related to this?
I've noticed that most video players, browser embeds, Youtube, VLC, whatever, have a run-on. You click pause, and the video keeps going for probably half a second, so if you're trying to capture a specific frame, fuck your sack.
- In VLC you can hit E for Next Frame. I think its full stop on YouTube.
  I'm wondering if that's something hardware decoder related (like it goes fuck it, I've decoded it, you're watching it), because I can't say I've noticed that on even the shittiest websites, at least on my PC.

At first it all seems normal, every now and then a random sound effect is replaced by ominous hooting. Every hour, on the hour, a green owl flashes on the screen for a frame or two, it's eyes boring into you before vanishing. Once every 50 or so times it pumps your volume up, selects speakers as output and let's loose a screeching hoot. Random popups slowly ramping up "Restart your streak today", "Where did you go?", "Duo misses you". At first just once or twice a day, but steadily increasing in intensity till it's one every 23 seconds.

It said "harmless"…

Instant flashback to the MSN Messenger virus where you could remotely open your friends CD-drive

That one got my mom once and she freaked out at the neighbor kid because he 'knew computers' so it must have been him.

It was not a virus, but still great fun: coworker had a fat UNIX workstation, but no idea of the particulars except for the program he was using. I knew my ways around such machines, and I could log in from another machine via serial terminal.

What the coworker knew about the audio capabilities of his machine was the occasional "beep" it made. I found the "auplay" command, and a list of 8-bit audio samples.

So one day I was sitting at the PC next to him, logged in, and command ready to run, and waited for an error message to pop up. Then I pressed return, starting "auplay laughter.au".

That face.

Well hey, that domain's available!
- Funny, though it is not an internet address but a filename.
So you had the moment, and you just sent a laugh? Suspicious story edit imo, you streamed him a huge fart, didn't you?

Sounds like a variation of the Ohio virus. I used to have a copy of it for the Amiga Amstrad. It would trigger and make the piezo speaker say “Ohio Ohio Ohhhh!”

When I worked at an MSP in early 2000s they would “prank” new hires with a site that did this. It would keep creating popups so you couldn’t close them. That stopped after customers heard it. More horrid graphical “pranks” replaced it of course.

2000s office culture sounds like frats
- Pretty much. Maybe worse. I'm not sure how the business survived for so long. That is barely the tip of the iceberg.

A virus that changes the font every time you go to a new page or hit refresh

Id actually enjoy that for a lot of things outside of books. And in books it is only a problem because some use font to point different povs or what not. Currently reading "the book of elsewhere" and I know this isnt the first by a longshot.

Depending on you definition of harmless, I'd randomly replace one character every 1000 with an alternative version, newlines from crlf to lf, spaces, even some printable characters have similar options in other languages

A virus that replaces the normal space with a random one of similar space characters that all look normal to the end user but would fuck up programming.
One that replaces tab with 4 spaces.
If you just replace letters with alternate versions of those letters, with different Unicode, wouldn’t it set off the spell checker?
Oh, that would be fun.
- I was thinking more about source code, bash scripts won't run on Unix if you got a crlf and cli editors do not display them differently (by default). Python scripts needed a declaration on top to run with a certain encoding, but the error there is clearer. If you use them as string constants it's also going to just work internally but may break if you compare them with an external value

I'll call it Windows 11.

When I was in high school in the 90s a group of us in computer class made a 'virus' that would launch the hamster dance website in all of the classroom computers randomly. We had to put it on a diskette and install it manually on each computer but at the time none of the computers even had antivirus so the school had to reformat them to remove it.

There's a 1 in 50 chance that any copy text command cuts the text instead, and vice-versa.

When you click the mouse button, the pointer position moves up to 10px in a random direction before applying the click.

I believe that specific site was called "Last Measure". It would also open up a bunch of shock sites...

Yep. I remember you could go to *.on.nimp.org and it'd lock up the browser with alert() loops, play something loud and obnoxious, and show shock images. In middle school we'd convince people to go to something like runescapehacks.on.nimp.org in school. I specifically remember one that said "Everyone come look, I'm looking at gay porn!" on repeat.
- Something like that web site happened to our secretary ages ago. The boss, standing behind her, had asked her to look something up, she innocently clicked on one "search result", and porn ads popped up. Whenever she closed a window, more opened. All while the CEO was looking over her shoulder. I was called, and killed Netscape, and had to explain that this was not the secretaries fault. I entered the same search, and showed them both the amazingly genuine looking result, and the CEO said that this could have happened to him, too. And he was thankful to learn how to kill the browser in such a case.

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.
Right it was like those jumps scare 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.
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"

I had one guy in 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 ran it it would use the PC speakers to play a 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 if it did anything else.

Bootable USB with w11

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

How harmless are we talking? I'm thinking of one that randomly "locks" the next file you try to open that was last accessed over 30 days ago. It prompts you with "File locked by last user, please enter username/email and password"

No matter what you enter, it unlocks the file.

Then the next time it triggers, it prompts you again, but blocks you from using the same username and password.

Rinse and repeat while the user keeps giving you all their user names and passwords over time.

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.

I'd make Windows 11

Edit: Whoops, that's not harmless

The mouse cursor switches between normal and inverted every 2 seconds.

theres used to be a DOS batch script line you could put into a windows startup that pipes the video output into the keyboard input, immediately crashing the machine. i believe this was patched after windows 7.

Switch the M and N keymaps

Also delete and enter

Delete is the one we use to remove the character in front of the cursor, amiright? I feel like enter and backspace is more havok for the common keyboard user, but iv no idea for programmers and such.
- yeah sorry had a 6am brainfart and meant backspace. But, on the other hand, they'd expect that one....

That poor guy that thought he accomplished it by just having a virus that changed peoples files to pictures from Clannad but got arrested for copyright.
Like genue wishing this one.

"sleep 1 >> etc/rc.local" >> etc/rc.local

RedReader my beloved 😢

Not so harmless to the guy living in Iran that got stoned.