What's the most silly, petty, funny virus you've created? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 days ago by Atomic@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Personally I've only ever written two. One that created multiple textfiles in various folders under windows that all grew exponentially. This was in the age of HDD so it could actually caused some serious problems. I created it because a guy in my class stole my homework by copying my files. So i created this virus, named it something fitting and "forgot" to close my laptop when i went to the bathroom.

And another that once every 40 minutes + (5 to 50) minutes would open your cd tray and then close it after 2 seconds. No one used CD's at this point and i just wanted to prank some colleges.

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[-] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 13 points 3 days ago

Not me. I was the (new inexperienced) PHB.

We had brought on a crazy-expensive, crazy-smart, workaholic but somewhat sophomoric contractor named Bruce.

He was not shy about stupid requirements ("Make it look like it's doing something while it works? Okay, I'll have it print dots. Fuck-all to do with how many records it's actually updated, but sure, it can print dots that you can waste time staring at."). He was not shy about contract requirements ("Fucking Cleveland? Then I want more hourly and a fucking Jacuzzi")

One fine day my manager had had enough of his sarcasm and backtalk and just fired him in the middle of a handover meeting. No warning to me. Whole project got slapped.

Bruce had approximately 20 minutes to gather his shit and leave the building.

About an hour after he did, every screen in the building was replaced with an image from Calvin & Hobbes -- of Hobbes being tossed out of the front door. Management threw a hissy, myself & 2 other technical managers were pressed into emergency security service to hunt down whatever nefarious thing the Bruce Worm was doing.

Turned out to be nothing -- just replaced the screen backgrounds, one time, that's it. They decided not to press charges.

If you're out there, Bruce, you're still a legend to me man.

[-] Zarobi@aussie.zone 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

This was all in school

Wrote a script that runs on startup and creates a service in the background. It just opened the CD drive at random intervals. I think it was every 300–30,000 seconds

Wrote a program, again that runs on startup and creates a service. On a much shorter interval every 15–150 seconds, it jiggles the mouse cursor slightly. Just enough to cause a mis-click

Another program that replaces a full stop keypress with a comma 10% of the time. Really funny for assignments and typing URLs

Another one ejects the floppy drive at random intervals. This one I never released due to data loss risk

Another that kills the monitoring software the school I.T. team uses for watching your screen or preventing you playing flash games

Finally one that makes the computer go BEEP every once in a while

Basically I was just an annoying troll

The school I.T. department got really mad at me and banned me from all computers lol

[-] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 days ago

Another program that replaces a full stop keypress with a comma 10% of the time. Really funny for assignments and typing URLs

Holy shit. Calm the fuck down Satan. We got enough problems as it is.

[-] 69420@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago

Not really a virus, but coworker left his laptop open and unattended for a while. As punishment, I installed a script with a cron job that ran at random intervals between 10 minutes and 2 hours. The script set the speaker volume to just barely audible, played a sound of a whisper voice that just said "hey", then reset the volume back to where it was.

[-] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago

Imagine thinking you were just doing a harmful prank, only to later learn that guy was admitted to a psychiatric hospital being convinced he was hearing voices when others said they heard nothing. Now that's side-character plot twist for a movie.

[-] vrek@programming.dev 6 points 3 days ago

Not exactly what you ask for but I still find it funny... When I was a child we still had 3.5 floppy disks. A friend convinced me that you get computer viruses like you get human viruses. If you rub dirt from outside on the tape inside the disk there is a chance you could put a virus on the disk.

Did it cause a computer virus? No! Did it destroy the disk drive? Yes! Were my parents mad? Absolutely!

[-] palordrolap@fedia.io 4 points 3 days ago

Do social engineering hacks count?

Back when I had a high-level tech job (for which I was severely underqualified), my team were given a decommissioned Linux server each to mess around with and develop on. I convinced one of my colleagues to let me log in to his server as root for a sec. Then I ran a quick shell one-liner that repeatedly kicked anyone that wasn't on my tty. He could log in, only to be logged right back out again.

Prank successful, I cancelled it fairly quickly.

Then I let him have a turn on my server. Gave him the username "root" and its password. He got a fake shell that kind of, sort of, worked like Bash, but he couldn't do much of anything.

If the quotes around "root" didn't give it away, I'd changed the uid 0 username to something else and "root" was just a regular user. (And a couple of the fake shell's commands would lie and say it was uid 0.)

[-] Nomad@infosec.pub 6 points 3 days ago

Wrote a Trojan horse at 15 that could play over 100 different fart sounds on demand on the victims computer. Failed to implement real time screen streaming from the victims computer and that's how that project got canceled. This was in visual basic around the beginning of the new millennium mind you...

[-] WoodScientist@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Covid-19.

[-] thisbenzingring@lemmy.today 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Back in the day, Windows had a weakness in the config.sys and autoexec.bat

and Futureshop pissed me off...

so I made their display machines blue screen on boot and then fubar Windows, so they had to system restore.

[-] BigTuffAl@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 days ago

definitely Cyclospora Minus One

after Taco Bell poisoned me i took half a Z-pack, used only Triclosan handwash, washed my body with selenium sulfide and ketoconazole while relieving myself in the river

figure the six or seven times i managed it should catch on SOMEWHERE for the lulz

[-] muhyb@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago

It's the only one and it was accidental. Don't remember what I was trying to do but I was in a computer class in high school, doing something with BASIC. What I did was basically is, the same window opens infinitely until RAM is full, then Windows crashes into BSOD. It was a fun view. Tried it on another PC in the class to be sure too, transferred it via a diskette.

[-] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

The only major accident I've had is when I was 17 and worked over the summer for a major auto manufacturer. I was tasked with writing a piece of software to make inputs easier to a bash script some nerd made on his own free time that they now pretty much relied upon since it saved them several hours each time they run the script.

To try and make a long story short(er). I had access to a server, that I was told was a temporary server, and there was nothing important on it, I had access to create and run files. I did not have access to monitor, kill, or terminate any processes. I made a silly mistake and created an infinite loop, but it wasn't your average infinite loop. It was the worst kind of infinite loop imaginable. Took a few executions to diagnose where exactly I had fucked up. I fixed the problem, no more infinite loop. And it actually worked. But these processes still sat there in the background. And they grew, and grew, and then another server started helping out to try and save his server friend. And when that wasn't enough, a third server tried to help, and so on.

I noticed that things were starting to run a bit slowly when browsing the server for files, others complained as well that the servers were slow today. And then I get a phone call from the head of IT, asking me if I need all of these thousands of processes running to which I shamefully replied "no....". But it was too late, and so much had stopped responding that they could not kill it. They pretty much emergency shut down two thirds of all their servers in house in order to save the rest. I had pretty much created rabies but for servers. Anyone infected had a death sentence. It was only a matter of time. Pretty much anything, anyone had worked on that day was gone.

I had a coffee with the head of IT later, He didn't blame me and was really nice about it. The data on the server I was given access to was not important, that's why they let me use it. But they had not considered that the server load when above the threshold is then shared to other servers, and that they should have isolated the load from that server as well so it doesn't spill over to another. It was a genuine lesson learned for everyone.

this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2026

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