What's the craziest infection you've ever had?

Morvotron

Level 7
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Mar 24, 2015
307
Now we all love informatics security, but in the past we (pretty much all, not everybody) got infected, or we've recieved a computer to "clean virus"

What's the craziest or the most dangerous infection you've ever experienced yourself or had to remove from a computer?

I remember this one time when i was around 13 years old and from one day to another i couldn't acess to internet. Everything else was alright, i simply couldn't acess to it. Everytime i tried, a pop up would block me and say "You're infected with X virus, if you want internet acess, pay". I went to the system files and in PROGRAM FILES (yeah program files) there was this folder called something like "internet blocking". I was like yeah of course this aint be the virus. Well coder stayed home that programming class. I removed that software and run a scan with AVG (in that time i was protected by AVG). And voila, internet connection.

I really never understood how i got infected either how did the software to block my acess to the web..

What about you?
 

kev216

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Aug 6, 2014
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My weirdest infection was my first infection ever and I hope my last one. It happened about 4 years ago, when I friend of me gave me a cracked minecraft launcher, because he said it was a nice game. I was so stupid to open it and then a ransomeware locked my computer. Actually it ran not immediately. I was able to play the game but after 30 minutes, a popupscreen appeared and all I saw was my desktop background but explorer.exe and everything else was closed. There was one window that was constantly flashing, so that I wasn't able to go to taskmanager with the keyboard shortcuts, nor with clicking with my mouse somewhere. I needed to close my pc by pressing the power button, since it was the only thing that I could do. It took me 8 days to restore my pc, since the malware passed my Panda AV. I tried lots of tools, but even the rescue disks of Kaspersky and Bitdefender were not able to remove the infection. So after trying and trying, I was able to remove the infection thanks to Norton Power Eraser. It was the main and only computer in my house, so my parents were not that happy what happenend, but luckily I was able to remove it after more than a week playing around with it. And apart from the fact that the infection was partially because of me, I was actually a bit proud that I succeed in removing it, since I also was the only one in the family that knew something about computers.
I didn't knew that much about malware and AV's at that time, but after I removed the malware, I became very interested in it. From that time, till now, I think I have tried about every AV on the planet now, and I began to read more and more interesting articles about malware and disinfection. It was also the start of cleaning up my friends pc's. That's also the main reason why I joined MalwareTips, so the malware actually also had some good influence on me ;)
 
C

Crystal_Lake_Camper

the craziest infection I ever had was way back in 2003. it whas a very annoying spyware infection from a rogue spyware scanner ( I do not remember the name of it ) what straight comes to mind , remembering this , was the fact that popups of bugs ( cockroaches?) popped up in the computerscreen every 5 minutes in various positions like they where doing the whole kamasutra deal , if you catch my drift ;) it whas more a big annoyance , than the damage it caused....luckely for me spyware doctor and spybot search n destroy came like nights in shining armor to help me out :)
 

Atlas147

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I've never truly been infected before but have come close to it many times. I think one of the craziest things that happened was that one of my friends on facebook messaged me and asked if I would do a test on a software and do a survey for it. I didn't really know this person really way but I was aware that she was a real person, I've seen her around in school. So I agreed, she sent me the link and I downloaded it, but before running it I sent it up to virustotal just to make sure because this whole thing smelled fishy, and sure enough there were several AVs that detected it as a trojan, I sent the malware sample to the malware exchange site and now almost every AV detects it.

I also messaged the person back that I ran the exe and tried to get more info out of her but to no avail. But I'd still call this a win for the good guys
 

SherKaan

Level 12
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Mar 17, 2014
575
I don't get infected now, but the one infection I remember was the "Worm: Win32/Parite.A"

It infected my PC like 12-13 years ago. It infected the system through a DVD disk (autoplay.exe) and infected the whole damn PC. It was quite messy at that time. My limited computer knowledge was also to blame for back then.

 

Rishi

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I've had the boring infections, none of them crazy just plain dark and murky. One I remember was 5 years ago, a Win32.Generic worm I had gotten from an infected USB. It tried to trash all the win32 binary files it could find on my system and was really fast like it was on space cake or something like that.It was really going berserk uncensored until I downloaded and installed Dr.Web and it quarantined it perfectly. I'd say I only lost about 15% of my data which was none-so-important.Since then I have gotten malware-savvy, out of the curiosity why would anyone design such a malintent for others without a reason?
 

shukla44

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Jan 14, 2016
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I only got 2 infections in my life that i will call crazy & most nerve-racking. After the second one i started using Kaspersky & never had an infection.

First was when i was online & my High School result was supposed to be announced. My friend send me a link to the site that was distributing it. I followed it. It was a legit link but the ads on it was not. I clicked something or else and i got a nasty piece of spyware/adware. It blocked my internet access & my computer started running very slow, crawling, then advertisements, man-oh-man, about hundreds of advertisement popped-up on my screen & internet access was blocked to all the sites except malicious one cause i could still get the ads on my screen. Then the results were announced, couldn't get them at that time, had to find out through my friend. Luckily the spyware/adware was removed by Spyware doctor & spyware terminator.

Second was when i got infected with the virus sality. Got infected by my friends USB which was infected at a cybercafe. I was using AVG free at the time. It was not helpful at the time of infection, then when it did detect it, I ran a scan & i had automatic protection on in it or something, cause it detected it in every executable file & .dll file it could find & started deleting it. Well, After deleting quite a few, it froze, i restarted, windows crashed. Couldn't boot. Had to reinstall the OS, and a new security suite (Kaspersky). I guess AVG has come a long way since then. I wouldn't know, never used it after that incident.
 
Last edited:
A

Alkajak

Top 3:

3. Probably user error on my part, but it is the last infection I had before becoming active on these forums. Installed MPC Cleaner on my PC, and for the life of me, I could not uninstall it. It left MPC Cleaner folders in my Program Files and Program Data where I did not have the correct administrator privileges to delete them. I am the only user on the computer and I am the administrator.

2. Just the other day, I was cleaning up some infections from PCs at work with my Toolbox USB. I had one computer in particular that had a good amount of malware on it. Upon the malware removal, I re-opened my Toolbox USB, "Empty". I plug it into my main computer (where show hidden files is enabled), everything is there, in the right place, but hidden. The malware somehow hid every single file and folder on the USB during the clean-up.

1. Windows XP days (edit: maybe even Windows 95). Get hit by a Trojan. Boot up the PC while connected to an internet source. Get a warm welcome from a 60-second shutdown timer instantly.
 

Ink

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Jan 8, 2011
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@Morvotron Never been infected :p Age doesn't matter it's the persons understanding and knowledge of security and computing (aswell as having a good security product running in real-time).
50% disagree. People born in the past decade have had better security options, than when compared to the availability of knowledge (through education and Internet resources) before early 2000's. Also modern systems are generally more secure than older, more vulnerable systems. For example, Windows only had Windows Firewall after Service Pack 2 (or 1?).

What do senior PC user's think? :)
 

harlan4096

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Apr 28, 2015
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I have never had a ransom-ware/crypt-virus infection.... not because a security suite/tool protected me but once You are
aware of danger out there, everyday You learn/read/search how to protect Your system in InterNet, also common sense is important...
 

safe1st

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Jan 29, 2016
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I dont know how many years ago is that. I remember one of my friend ge infected and he told me everything about how he get infected. Since that, Im even more careful in installing programs, surfing, etc...

That day, most infections happen here is from USB. Just because school projects.... -_-
 

kaddy

Level 2
Verified
Jan 23, 2016
60
never personally have had a dangerous infection on my personal machine, but i count my immediate family PCs in my home as my own as i use them too, so Carberp for my mother's desktop, and for my dad's Dell Laptop, W32 Virut. For me, in a VM, most likely Ramnit, or Sinowal.
 

jamescv7

Level 85
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Honorary Member
Mar 15, 2011
13,070
I think way back on year 2000-2010 where those old threats like Autorun attack, LNK shortcut virus, Conficker Worm and PUP unusual infections brought those endless crashes, lack of implementation to stop the autoplay feature and AV's bypassed those common threats.

Usually in my environment binded with, none of those ransomware, rootkit, bootkit and other nasty suffered even in such ordinary browsing, and of course no plans to test them as the complicated process is already observed.
 

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