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, but 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.

Also there was a point before that I got ultra-paranoid about my computer having a virus, and I would Google processes in task manager and got super scared and installed some fake rogue antivirus from a ‘company’ called Uniblue. A lot of their ‘marketing’ was pretending they were part of Microsoft, and I thought it was super legit. It wasn’t. Turns out being paranoid about computer security when you are completely computer illiterate is a perfect way to get malware.

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.

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

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.

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

Was reading about the latest malvertising exploit on bleepingcomputer when lo and behold, said malvertising ad hit and tried to take over my PC.

That was the last time I used the internet without an adblocker.

I do have to admire the irony of a malvertising ad hitting bleepingcomputer on the article about said ad.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TBH I never had one

I’ve never been able to confirm if it’s true or not but around 2014/2015, I had a malicious Firefox extension that apparently originated from Google Chrome. What it did was basically put ads on all webpages, including blank pages and it was really hard to remove because it would just keep reinstalling itself until I uninstalled Chrome and then found and deleted the folder that contained the origin of the malware.

I wasn’t able to do much research on my own, mostly because I didn’t really know how to, but everyone online (possibly including Mozilla themselves) who was infected by the malware believed that Chrome downloaded the malicious Firefox extension. The main reason people believed it was because not only did the malware only seem to infect users who had both Chrome and Firefox installed but the origin of the malware would keep reinstalling itself until you removed either Chrome or Firefox and stuck with just one browser.

Just had it. Haven’t seen an ad in ages, but there’s some issues with YouTube, so I am watching my course on their shitty website. It literally showed me an ad of a man peeing.

Dang, I have no clue how I would explain the future to my kid self.

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.

Only 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.