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.
Why the hell would one do that for THREE documents? I’d be exfiltrating everything out of there if I were them, if not for that Russian guy’s trial, at least for my curiosity and reading pleasure!
Me too, and I’m surprised how I haven’t. As a kid I used to pirate stuff from tons of shady websites without any antivirus software on an outdated Windows XP.
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, 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.
Well, why what? Why do I have to install it? Because there are A LOT of old people in my village, who only ever used windows, and when I repair their stuff or get them new stuff I often have to (re)install windows. And windows is the virus I’m talking about, because IMHO, it literally IS Spyware, Adware and a Trojan. Literally every criteria is met for those kinds of viruses. MacOS is just a lighter Spyware and potentially a Trojan, but can be expanded to be all three (especially a RAT Trojan) very easily. Linux, on the other hand, has only very few, single instances of separate Distros having ads (Canonical/Ubuntu) or Spyware via Telemetry (Also Ubuntu), but not only can Telemetry be disabled, one could also use another distro. Like Arch btw.
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.
Yeah, I also stopped using it, but I was following a self defense course. I just wish more people/websites would host their own videos and I could just pay in a simple way (so not bc).
I think lot of people don’t realize that you can get malware just from browser vulnerabilities, and not just from downloading and running malicious files. Adblocking isn’t just an issue of annoyance, it’s an important security tool.
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.
The old search engine hijackers were honestly the worst malware I had to deal with somewhat regurarly
Anything more serious either cleaned up with malwarebytes or warranted reformatting the hard drive, but the hijackers were relatively easy but annoying and tedious to get rid off
To be fair her teaching assistant put it on there and she has a tendency of clicking on everything and just isn’t computer literate at all so it was more of an inevitability than anything. It installed a reskinned Chromium that redirected searched so it wasn’t super bad. is ran MalwareBytes and got a few more possible threats too. Glad it wasn’t anything super severe. I’m out of practice lol.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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”.