Malware

My Infected Imagination

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During my spare time, when I haven’t been working, playing or anything I’ve been binge watching YouTube videos where people mess with tech support scammers, and more recently been watching old virus porn from the MSDOS to Win95 era. Then it hit me that it would be fun to play a prank on one of my co-workers using a little imagination, and a USB thumb drive with DOSBOX and a neutered virus just to see what his millennial ass will do when he encounters it… I’m a millennial, so I get to say that. 😛

I decided to download one of my favorite viruses from archive.org’s malware museum, a place where you can download and even see the effects of old viruses from a few decades ago. My favorite virus on the site is a fun one armed bandit game; in the old days if you ran this virus it would wipe your hard drive clean and store all of your data in RAM. You have a small chance of saving your data if you win the game, but if you fail you would lose all of your data and have to either rely on your old backups or have to start from scratch. In this current era the virus has been defanged and is completely harmless, all that remains is the threatening message and an addictive game… Oh! and a chance to troll my co-worker. :trollface:

I have it all setup on my thumb drive for tomorrow morning, looking forward to his reaction when he looks at the computer screen tomorrow morning. :trollface:

I also have to say this virus looks quite silly on my Amazon Fire 7 too. Yes, I have malware on my tablet… from the 90’s. :v:

Weird Ransomware Of The Day

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I’ve seen a lot of strange applications and joke viruses in my time, such as ones that make your keyboard sound like a typewriter or one that would shut down your system at noon for you to take a tea break; but this malware is just all kinds of WTF:

In what could only be a joke, a new ransomware has been discovered called “PUBG Ransomware” that will decrypt your files if you play the game called PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Discovered by MalwareHunterTeam, when the PUBG Ransomware is launched it will encrypt a user’s files and folders on the user’s desktop and append the .PUBG extension to them. When it has finished encrypting the files, it will display a screen giving you two methods that you can use to decrypt the encrypted files.

You can either play PUBG for an hour (or just three seconds) or input a “restore code”. The malware doesn’t seem to be that advanced, as people have already found out that renaming any executable to TslGame.exe will also decrypt the users files. :v:

It’s unclear how this “ransomware” is circulating, but for the most part it seems rather harmless. :zorak: I wonder if this will be added to the malware museum. :trollface:

The Malware Museum

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This is your computer, this is your computer on drugs.
This is your computer on drugs.

Want to look at some old viruses for nostalgia sake? There is a Malware Museum with neutered old MSDOS viruses that run in DOSBox within your browser, or you can download them as keepsakes if you have DOSBox installed on your system. Some of them are pretty trippy like LSD.COM, or weird like this virus featuring some old guy walking across the DOS screen. There’s even an interactive one that gives you the option to play one armed bandit to save your data, heh.

I remember a few of the ones on that page, but by the time I saw any of them they were gutted and turned into joke viruses. These truly are some fine examples of early trolling in the 80’s and 90’s.