Darn Scary 68k Virus

[kreats]

There were some viruses back in the day that physically destroyed hardware.

Dropping the head repeatedly on the hard drive was one way. Think there were some that screwed with the floppy also.

And while technically not damaging hardware - overwriting bios or other firmware will make you feel like you've been "nuked".

 

[dbraverman88]

Well, if any of you mad scientists need hydraulics, let me know - it's what I do for a living!

If you were anywhere near NY, NY I would be asking you for a job.

--David

 

[Ryoohki]

I remember one trick program that somehow managed to find its way into the Control Panel folder of an iMac that played back the system alert sound back upon loading into the desktop. I didn't keep it

 

[coius]

fnny

Question: is "Y" a vowel or not? if it is, you just faked it

EDIT: you are faking it, and it's also a consonant. It's both!!! so you are faking it, and I am wrong/right

 

[Ryoohki]

ftp://ftp.cam.com/pub/mac/anti-virus/VirusAlert-NVP-TrojanHorse.txt

Semantic security alert

Disables (a,e,i,o,u) keys so your wrong Coius

It would be great to collect some of this stuff.

Another prank that comes to mind was Playing Possum however i think you had to pay money for that one.

 

[shred]

I used to like some of the Mac viruses (virii ?) - they were more jokes than the evil, scary things that get around in the Windows community nowadays.

nVir, I think was one that would look for Macintalk (software speech synthesiser). If the virus found it, a voice would come out of the Mac at random intervals saying "Don't panic" (partly a reference to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy?). That was all it did! Unfortunately it contained some bugs that tended to make infected computers unstable, but it was *very* common.

A good practical joke extension was "DOSsHell". During boot, the Mac display would go black and a C:\ prompt would appear in the top left corner. Pressing a key would resume the normal boot process.

 

[Scott Baret]

Yes, No Vowels was the one. It was on the CD that came with Macintosh Revelations, a very good book from the mid 1990s.

nVIR was indeed the one that said "don't panic" but I believe it also was a RAM and resource hog. And yes, it was widespread and came in a bunch of strains.

There was also an AfterDark 3.0 module that did a DOS prompt. If I recall it even typed in format c: from time to time...

 

[register]

Another funny piece of software I remember was an extension to manipulate the mouse driver in a way that let the pointing arrow slide downwards to the lower edge of the screen. Very annoying, as it made to point and click a challenging task.

<-

 

[MrMacPlus]

:beige: Uh, I used to have the MerryXmas virus that screwed w/ my hypercard stacks.

 

[madmax_2069]

i remember belch extension for Mac OS and belchx for OS X, a good extension which causes you Mac to belch every time you start up.

it sounds to me like its one of those joke extensions.

i went as far as making a snapshot of the computers desktop with the mouse pointer out of view and hiding all of the icons and making the snapshot i took as the background.

 

[MrMacPlus]

I read that the system 7(.5?) cpu energy saver CP would, when activated, start a shrill shut down sequence, w/ a particularly large number and a red screen. As soon as I get some time I will put 7.5 on my plus to try this out. I don't think it's a virus. :b&w:

 

[Dog Cow]

there is no possible way that a virus could cause a literal "meltdown". this isn't the movies, software has basically a null effect on hardware. it can only do what the hardware was designed too do, and i highly doubt Motorola put in a "self destruct" instruction set into its chips.

In a general sense, you are correct, but there are some virii which can destroy hardware or alter its operation. There was one virus for Mac which destroyed a certain chip in your printer which rendered the printer useless.

Virus Reference 2.1.6 mentions an 'Unnamed PostScript hack' which

disables PostScript printers and requires replacement of a chip on

the printer logic board to repair. A Mac virus guru says:

"The PostScript 'Trojan' was basically a PostScript job that

toggled the printer password to some random string a number of

times. Some Apple laser printers have a firmware counter that

allows the password to only be changed a set number of times

(because of PRAM behavior or licensing -- I don't remember which),

so eventually the password would get "stuck" at some random string

that the user would not know. I have not heard any reports of

anyone suffering from this in many years."

Source: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-virus/macintosh-faq/