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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I sat down on my first day at a new job as senior admin. My boss hadn’t even arrived yet and I had no access. Someone walks up and asks “Hey, a bunch of our files are garbled, can you take a look?”

Fourth infection in a year. That was the start of my worst job ever.

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.

So grandpa had a computer problem. Turns out he installed one of the early locker trojans. He: “It’s all my own fault.” Family: “no grandpa, that were some ugly hackers”. So i removed the virus and checked the computer. Turns out it was his fault. He tried to watch “russian removed porn” and installed the virus in that process. He was like 85 and needed help washing himself. So IDK what his intentions were… The worst part: I had to keep a straight face and confirm the “hackers” therory. That secret will die with me. And now you.

Nothing major, just lots and lots of browser toolbars in the XP era and contact with some trojans (especially on torrents) that were thankfully caught by the antiviruses available back then.

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!)

Downloaded a sketchy copy of some hard to find software some years ago. Once I tried to run it, I immediately noticed that the fans started spinning fast and everything was much slower. A quick ctrl + shift + esc and I saw that CPU usage was over 90% - Checking the detailed processes, I found the executable I tried to run and force-stopped it. It almost immediately restarted itself. Obviously, it already set up some other process to check for that process, so I started killing other processes with unfamiliar names until said process stopped restarting.

All good thus far, I went to check %appdata% and of course, there was a sketchy executable there that ran the keepalive process. Deleted it, searched all over for similarly named executables, everything seemed clear. Turned off the internet, rebooted the PC. Turned the internet back on and everything was still fine. I did notice later that I suffered some damage in the form of some files getting encrypted, which was why the CPU usage shot up in the first place - it was one of those ransomware type that, once finished, would no doubt sell the encryption password for a bitcoin deposit.

My other experience with malware was on Android. It’s amazing the lengths some FUCKING HARDWARE VENDORS will go in order to install adware on everything, right, Xiaomi, Samsung? Seriously, being forced to see an ad when you just want to use the fucking calculator? Fuck that shit.

Your PC is now Stoned.

This thing is from 1987 and I still have it on some of my old floppies.