Some time around 2010 or so I found a FREE DOWNLOAD for some software I wanted on Youtube. Normally I wouldn’t fall for such a thing, but the video had a huge amount of likes and a basically no dislikes so I thought it was legit (I wasn’t well-acquainted with the concept of view bots). Ended up with some nasty malware, had to reinstall. Don’t run executables off youtube, kids.
Also there was a point before that I got ultra-paranoid about my computer having a virus, and I would Google processes in task manager and got super scared and installed some fake rogue antivirus from a ‘company’ called Uniblue. A lot of their ‘marketing’ was pretending they were part of Microsoft, and I thought it was super legit. It wasn’t. Turns out being paranoid about computer security when you are completely computer illiterate is a perfect way to get malware.
Was installing Windows XP and forgot to unplug the computer from the internet. It got a virus during install.
Personal: Booted up a friend’s infected disk on my Amiga, which then infected the HD. Mass panic for ten minutes or so as I ran Virus Checker or VirusZ on it.
Work: In 2003-ish we had an infection of… I can’t even remember the name of it, but we had to manually go round and run a program on everybody’s computer to get rid of it.
Since then I’ve seen a few people get their files encrypted by Ransomware, but no major infections.
I’ve never been able to confirm if it’s true or not but around 2014/2015, I had a malicious Firefox extension that apparently originated from Google Chrome. What it did was basically put ads on all webpages, including blank pages and it was really hard to remove because it would just keep reinstalling itself until I uninstalled Chrome and then found and deleted the folder that contained the origin of the malware.
I wasn’t able to do much research on my own, mostly because I didn’t really know how to, but everyone online (possibly including Mozilla themselves) who was infected by the malware believed that Chrome downloaded the malicious Firefox extension. The main reason people believed it was because not only did the malware only seem to infect users who had both Chrome and Firefox installed but the origin of the malware would keep reinstalling itself until you removed either Chrome or Firefox and stuck with just one browser.
The old search engine hijackers were honestly the worst malware I had to deal with somewhat regurarly
Anything more serious either cleaned up with malwarebytes or warranted reformatting the hard drive, but the hijackers were relatively easy but annoying and tedious to get rid off
The old search engine hijackers
I literally just cleaned up a computer at my wife’s workplace that had a hijacker on it like 2 weeks ago.
It’s honestly impressive how many ways there are to hide those just in the browser’s configs
Don’t remember how it happened but when I was a kid I got this virus on my laptop that would randomly open hundreds of Firefox tabs with this picture of Jeff the killer, with screaming audio at maximum volume and flashing black and white so fast it def would have killed an epileptic. Probably the most scared I’d ever been at that point. It also turned on my webcam light every time it happened, so somewhere on some filthy shut ins hard drive is a video of me at 12 years old throwing my laptop
