Alt+Tab goes to a random window instead of being in the order of recency
I'll call it Windows 11.
At first it all seems normal, every now and then a random sound effect is replaced by ominous hooting. Every hour, on the hour, a green owl flashes on the screen for a frame or two, it's eyes boring into you before vanishing. Once every 50 or so times it pumps your volume up, selects speakers as output and let's loose a screeching hoot. Random popups slowly ramping up "Restart your streak today", "Where did you go?", "Duo misses you". At first just once or twice a day, but steadily increasing in intensity till it's one every 23 seconds.
I had a boss that wasn't exactly technical. I wrote a power shell program that would randomly every 5-30 minutes give a pop-up that said "good job", which he always said regardless of what was going on. Placed it in his startup folder on his machine. I thought he would figure it out and tell me to knock it off.... Well I forgot about it, 9 months later during my annual performance review it popped up while I was looking at his screen. He apologized and just alt tabbed it away.
I offered to take a look and see if I couldn't stop it, and he said yes and then walked away to take a break. I then deleted the script I put on there. He gave me extra performance points (meaning a higher pay raise.)
I was in college during the years leading up to y2k and supported myself at the time getting IT infrastructure ready. Some friends and I decided to write a "virus" that, on bootup, checks to see if the current date is in the first week of January 2000 and if it is and a backup of the fonts is not found (so it'll only run once) then it'll back up your fonts and alter the originals to replace the y character with the k. This affected everything system wide.
That created more chaos than anticipated.
When you click the mouse button, the pointer position moves up to 10px in a random direction before applying the click.
The version I recall was once if those Flash animations with a cute squirrel or whatever saying something... but it was really quiet so you'd need to turn up the volume to hear. Then partway through it changed to sex stuff and blasted out in a voice like a monster truck announcer
"anal sex dot com, all anal, all the time!"
How harmless are we talking? I'm thinking of one that randomly "locks" the next file you try to open that was last accessed over 30 days ago. It prompts you with "File locked by last user, please enter username/email and password"
No matter what you enter, it unlocks the file.
Then the next time it triggers, it prompts you again, but blocks you from using the same username and password.
Rinse and repeat while the user keeps giving you all their user names and passwords over time.
Bootable USB with w11
I did this in high school, it was just a basic script that spawned a warning dialog box (the kind thats always on top) that just said you can't close this, part of the script action was making tge task scheduler check every few seconds if the script was running... If it wasn't then run it.
Since I was making the task scheduler do the checking it meant even if you tried to task manager force close the script it would just open again in a few seconds, it was not a permanent task it was a temporary one and every opening of the script would reset that task so basically the only way to get rid of it was to restart the computer as that would clear the task.
It wasn't a file, it was a webpage. And it loaded infinite popups showing a dude's gaping anus, turned the volume up to 100%, and played a loop of "Hey everyone, I'm looking at gay porno!"
goatse
I wrote a simple script once that ran in the background and all it did was toggle the state of the caps lock key every 30 minutes. I set it up on a co-worker's computer as a scheduled task for an April Fools prank one year. I thought for sure he'd figure it out pretty quickly, but by mid-day, he had completely disassembled his keyboard, convinced the button was getting stuck due to gunk buildup. Eventually I ended up just disabling the task so he thought he had managed to fix it himself.
The mouse cursor switches between normal and inverted every 2 seconds.
Oh, I have a seemingly harmless idea so evil, it will ruin the internet forever.
I will make it so every time you open any website, there will be a popup with a question that asks you to invade your privacy, and you can allow it to do so with one click, but you will have to dig through menus if you want to avoid it. Then, after some seconds, another popup will appear, asking you to create a login, no matter what you do. Then, it randomly will ask you to share your location. Yes, with a popup again. Then, just as you thought you're done, another window will open, grabbing your focus, which will demand you talk to a chatbot, and you can't close this one, only slightly minimize it.I Rick Rolled my entire school this way. Write a program that maxed the volume and held it there at 100%, minimised all open windows, downloaded a photo of Rick Astley and set it as your wallpaper, then started playing Never Gonna Give You Up. The only way to stop it was to power off the computer or wait the song out, then manually fix your wallpaper.
I saved the executable in a publically accessible location on the school's server that I shouldn't have had write access to, and sent a cleverly disguised link to a mate. He thought it was hilarious, and forwarded the email to a dozen of his mates. They forwarded it to all their mates, and pretty soon no teacher could go 60 seconds without another one of their students' laptops interrupting the class at max volume.
Best bit? I "taught a valuable lesson in cybersecurity" and didn't get in (much) trouble!!
There was a guy in my dorm who really didn't like his roommate. Really, really didn't like him. This was in the early aughts.
So one day he goes on his roommate's computer and puts a text file in his startup folder. The file says, "Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus!"
For context, Snood was a free video game people downloaded in the early aughts. Basically the same as Bust-A-Move, which probably doesn't clarify anything if you didn't already know what Snood is.
Anyway: "Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus! If you don't score [extremely difficult but not completely unrealistic high score] points, all of your files will be deleted!"
He laughed to himself and promptly forgot about it.
Weeks later, the roommate is on his computer in the middle of the night.
"What are you doing up? Go to bed."
"I can't. It's this stupid Snood virus."
On my dads computer, back in the day, I set the sound for every action in Windows to a silly song i downloaded off kazaa (Windows xp days, i believe)
So this was the sound that played for clicking the start menu, hovering over programs/apps, whatever it was and making that menu appear, and any sub menu for individual games or apps following that. Any kind of prompt like errors or "are you sures" etc, minimising/maximising a window. Everything!
That's what my virus would do. I just need the perfect sound to apply. Maybe that annoying tiktok song "Oh no! Oh no! Oh no no no no no!"
Three options come to mind.
A virus that adjusts your mouse sensitivity by like 5% every time you unlock your computer. Just enough that existing muscle memory is off, so you either have to adjust to the change or change it back every time.
A virus that installs and/or sets a similar but not quite right keyboard layout, and swaps to it randomly few boots. For example, setting the keyboard to Canadian Multilingual Standard instead of US English, where its only some of the punctuation keys that are changed.
A virus that randomly pops up a terminal window and outputs suspicious-looking text, and closes itself before the user has time to read it.
Autohotkey script that shuts the system down whenever someone types out certain key words. They of course include words related to looking up the issue like "help", "randomly", "virus" and so on. Not the most sophisticated but one I've actually done before.
Edit: Forgot to mention that ahk needs to be installed and the script must be placed in the autostart folder. Both can be achieved on a coworker's or family member's machine with a ducky usb stick.
On somethingawful back in the day if you were on any one page on their forums for more then about 20 minutes, a audio clip would play that said something like "HEY EVERYBODY I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORNO"
It was not a virus, but still great fun: coworker had a fat UNIX workstation, but no idea of the particulars except for the program he was using. I knew my ways around such machines, and I could log in from another machine via serial terminal.
What the coworker knew about the audio capabilities of his machine was the occasional "beep" it made. I found the "auplay" command, and a list of 8-bit audio samples.
So one day I was sitting at the PC next to him, logged in, and command ready to run, and waited for an error message to pop up. Then I pressed return, starting "auplay laughter.au".
That face.
Finds anything and everything that can be set to dark mode and sets it back to light mode, but not while you're using it and not immediately.
I don’t remember the details but my mom’s first cousin called me once to fix her computer when I was a teenager.
No matter what she typed it came out as, “I AM FUCKING GAY!”
Seems like all I had to do was type “stop”.
In my highschool programming class we made a TSR (in Borland pascal) that would change every 15th keypress to an "e". It wasn't self propagating, so it wasn't a virus per day, but it was highly annoying. It survived on memory after the netware logoff, and you could only get rid of it by rebooting.
We also had these everex brand 286 or 386 computers.... They had a little LCD screen that would read out what sector/track was being read on the disk. We found the memory address (80h) where we could write arbitrary text to the LCD. That was fun.
Supposedly there was a DOS virus that would spawn a pacman that would eat your letters as you typed them.
I have made some silly programs. One that moved the mouse pointer one pixel left, then down, right and up. It was quite annoying. Another that moved the mouse pointer when you reached the edge of the screen, touching the rightmost pixel row would move it to the left side of the screen and vice versa, same thing with top and bottom.
How about a programm which screams "aaaaaaa" after you unlock your screen. Barely hearable at first and it gets louder with every minute. People who don't know how to remove it would have to lock and unlock their screens every 5 minutes or so.
"sleep 1 >> etc/rc.local" >> etc/rc.local
A virus that changes Windows' sticky keys to only requiring two taps of the shift key.
«I’m watching porno» - not porn. This was around y2k
back when I was in school someone wrote a script that just openened the optical drive at random intervals and put it in the Autostart of every PC in the Comouter room
When I was in high school in the 90s a group of us in computer class made a 'virus' that would launch the hamster dance website in all of the classroom computers randomly. We had to put it on a diskette and install it manually on each computer but at the time none of the computers even had antivirus so the school had to reformat them to remove it.
Im afraid to post my obnoxious virus idea as I don't want mailboxes filled with job offers from microsoft and other big tech.
I'd make Windows 11
Edit: Whoops, that's not harmless
A screamer virus could bring the world to its knees.
I had one guy in the late 90s at my HS who made a program that copied itself onto every directory on the computer at startup. It was a .com file and if you ran it it would use the PC speakers to play a tone increasing in volume and pitch until it was unbearable. You had to do a hard boot to end it.
I also remember the Form virus that made the PC speakers make a sound each time you pressed a key. Can't remember if it did anything else.
That poor guy that thought he accomplished it by just having a virus that changed peoples files to pictures from Clannad but got arrested for copyright.
Like genue wishing this one.Not so harmless to the guy living in Iran that got stoned.
theres used to be a DOS batch script line you could put into a windows startup that pipes the video output into the keyboard input, immediately crashing the machine. i believe this was patched after windows 7.
RedReader my beloved 😢
