Viruses and worms in general: your experiences

Rather than hijacking (further) the more recent virus / worm threads, I thought it would be interesting to share some experiences:

My most interesting virus experience was on an old 386 machine; had just upgraded a couple of months earlier to Win 3.1 after running DOS on it for about 8 months; had my first color VGA monitor: This was in about '93, a year or so before I got on the internet, but had visited a few BBSes (Including one Gransee used to run!!!) and had installed a few shareware and freewaare programs (all bought from local retailers) so I have no idea where the virus came from.

Anyway, here is what happened: I'm sitting there working away, and my screen went black for a moment, then turned white, and line by line, as if being hand drawn with a crayon a drawing started to appear.

I watched (in awe and confusion) for a few minutes, never having heard of such a thing, then slowly it dawned on me that it must be a virus!

I rebooted, and it started up again about five minutes later. Rebooted again, to DOS and explored the hard drive: Couldn't find ANYTHING that seemed to be out of place.

I formatted the hard drive , reloaded the OSes and it ran for a couple of hours, then it started drawing pretty pictures for me again. I let it run ; It drew about 7 pictures over a two hour period, then re-started, drawing the same pictures but in a different order.

Each picture looked onscreen like a very artistically talented 10 year old would do with crayons and paper. Each drawing appeared stroke by stroke as if it was being done in real time by someone inside my monitor. It was amazing.

I tried to reinstall my OS'es again after an F-disk and reformatting, but then I had a BIOS problem that wouldn't recognize the the hard drive anymore. Replaced the hard drive and the Bios, and that finally fixed it.

I have spent several hours on the web trying to find if anyone else ever had the same sort of experience, but no luck. I still can't figure out how something that complex could be fitted on a 720K floppy or two along with shareware game or program, or be downloaded off a BBS at 300BPS (maybe it was a 1200BPS modem, I forget) without noticing.

Any of you guys ever heard the like?

What is YOUR weirdest or worst virus experience?

Weird. Your story is much more interesting that mine, but I guess I'll share mine anyways....

I tried to open a word file once, and it wouldn't open. I got a message that said "Word could not locate ____." A few days later, I did a normal Norton Anti-Virus scan and found 4 viruses! Norton disposed of all of them with ease. After that I could access my word files again.

Good idea for a thread, Silviron.

I don't think I would call my experience as being one of a "virus" since that word was not (IIRC) being used yet for purposely inserted "bugs" on computers.

After coming back to the Northwest from New Jersey, where I had been on-loan to Bell Telephone Laboratories to research and write some manuals on the installation and testing of data services, I put my first "home computer" on-line as a mail and news server (it was a multi-user UNIX system).

It had been on-line for several months, and I'd been swapping e-mail (just called "mail" then in the dark ages) back and forth with the folks I'd worked with back in NJ.

One day when I logged on to my server, at the console to check my personal e-mail, I was greeted with a very odd 'thing' happening on my text-only green and black screen. A bug, or more exactly a large cockroach, was drawn on my screen in alpha characters and proceeded to crawl across the screen until it left via the lower right corner.

It never came back, and I never did figure out how Don had done it all the way from NJ, but the next day I got a mail from from Don Majors, who we'd always referred to as our "resident hacker" back in NJ, asking if I'd gotten my "bug" from him.

In the twenty years since then I haven't had a machine taken over by a virus, and have always been a nut on proper system security.

"Sitting in my bunker,

here behind my (fire)wall

Waiting for the worms,

the worms to come" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif


Apologies to Pink Floyd


Dan

Silviron,
You sure that wasn't the "screen saver"...
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif nudge, nudge