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