Haha I remember the days of downloading random EXEs off the internet and running them to see what they do (also the days of CD-rom drives).
My auntie somehow managed to get a virus that played Für Elise through the motherboard speaker and never stopped so long as the thing was on. I don't think they ever solved it, in the end they just got a new PC.
Haha, in highschool I put sheep.exes into the school labs startup folders as a prank once. A couple days later the tech teacher approached me and was like "nobody's in trouble but these things are a nightmare and if I have to reimage half the lab to get rid of them it would personally ruin my day". Somehow all the sheep were gone by the next day
Ah shit the sheep thing! In fact, there were others I can't remember. And I seem to remember somewhere along the line they went from fun to spam things walking around your screen trying to make you buy shit or maybe they were trying to scam you, I can't remember but they weren't fun anymore, and hard to get rid of.
There was also a program that would open the CD-ROM drive and play a raspberry noise at random intervals. It was a fun prank to set it to run at login.
Back in my day, that used to be the only way a computer could produce sound. Later on you could purchase a specialized sound card that would take up a slot in your motherboard.
386 era machines often had a 4 inch speaker in the front panel. It couldn't do much. Some main boards still come with headers for a speaker, some even come with an electret beeper
A good number do, but you won't hear anything during normal operation. If your vomputer has ever beeped at you when you try to turn it on at 0% battery, accessed the bios, etc., there's a good chance that was the motherboard speaker.
Lol the für Elise thing is funny. Back in highschool I got a "PC maintenance" credit which had me assigned as support in the computer lab. I made a batch script that ran on startup and showed a warning message saying the hard disk will self destruct and did a countdown from 10 with the motherboard speaker beeping down, fun times
I remember there was a virus that had a tiny cat on the screen and it would chase your mouse cursor. Once it catches your mouse cursor, the computer would crash. It was freaking awesome.
These days not only would it open your CD drive, it would open your tax documents, your crypto wallet, your account cookies, probably even your banking information.
Great question! Not really my area of expertise, but probably there are at least a couple of possible avenues. One is decompilation and/or disassembly and static analysis. (Basically use automated tools to reconstruct the original source code as best it can and then read that imperfect reconstruction of the source code to figure out what it does.) Another is isolating it ("air gap" -- no network or connectivity to anything you care about) so you're sure it can't do any damage and running it with tools that record/report everything it does. (On Linux, one could use strace and/or GDB. On Mac, dtrace. Not sure what the equivalent is for Windows programs running on Windows.)
Actually, I guess another option could be to set up an isolated system, record a whole bunch of information about it before running the .exe then after running the .exe, examine it to see what you can find on the filesystem or in the registry or in RAM or whatever that might have changed. It wouldn't catch everything, though. Like if it made a network connection or something but didn't actually change anything on the filesystem, it might not leave any traces.
Whatever the case, it'd probably require some specialized tools and expertise. But it'd be an interesting project.
There are tracing programs that let you see when a program makes system calls to read and write files, control hardware, etc. It might be easiest to run it and see what it does in a VM sandbox. Process Monitor looks like a strace equivalent on windows.
How about the one that launched a dialog box: "Do you have a small penis? Yes/No", and if you moved your mouse near the "No" button, the button would run away around the screen?
This was a common April Fools prank back in my day. We would put a startup script on a person's computer that opened their CD drive at random intervals. Drove them nuts!
naw, what you do is write a small exe to play "youre the best" by joe espesito through the pcspeaker at 15% volume than you can trigger remotely..randomly until the user goes mad