You have done stupid things as a kid. I have done stupid things as a kid. We all have done stupid things as a kid.
This story is one of those stupid things I done as a kid which I am about to tell you right now because the subject I discuss here is kinda interesting? I don’t know I can hardly find any documentation at all of this weird computer virus I downloaded just as a youngster.
So it all started back in 2016 when I was only seven, and now back then I would just click any result that first pops up to me after I search something, even if some of them were malicious.
I probably got a ton of viruses I didn’t really know were viruses on my old now-dead computer, but the reason why my old computer died is actually the subject of this story and helped me understand what a computer virus actually was (or at least one of the more interesting forms they take).
So basically one day I was searching up stuff on Google on my very laggy device like “Free spongebob episodes” (but I’d royally mispell “Spongebob” in so many ways it was nearly unrecognizable) and eventually I landed on this rather interesting webpage which had a blue background and a low quality image of Spongebob on the right with some download links to Seasons 1 and 2 of the show as .zip files.
Another thing to note, albeit kinda unnecessary I assume but I’m just saying it here anyways is that this webpage seemed rather old too, it still used a hit-counter of all things which I didn’t really commonly see when browsing the net.
Now, if you couldn’t tell already I was in my Spongebob SquarePants craze at the time so of course I’d download the not suspicious looking zips and I’d extract them all in a desperate attempt to watch ‘em and that.. totally f*cked up my computer. This is when my vivid memory of this one day becomes more clear due to how this virus looked in general.
So first of all I was spammed with a bunch of popups with some weird looking cartoon fish that I know definitely weren’t from SpongeBob SquarePants with some nonsensical phrases on the images like “YNRG HRG OHGHEG” and other strange gibberish.
When I tried to open up Google for some reason it would keep closing itself which made me a little mad but then I went to try to play Roblox, only for the app to get closed aswell. So then I start clicking on any app I have on my computer in a desperate attempt to open them with nothing working. The popups themselves start becoming more weirder looking as time went on in just a span of a few minutes where now they just started looking more like cheap pixelated semi-overexposed images with photoshopped details put into them like human hands being attached to a real fish or a snail with some goat horns with the same nonsense phrases on them, unlike before where they previously just looked sorta like some obscure cartoon stock photo of fishes.
Now I start getting the feeling that my computer has something wrong with it so I go up to my dad who’s in the kitchen and I ask him to help me out with my device, he and I walk back to my room where my computer is in and he, like me, could definitely see something is a bit wrong with my computer. He tells me I should try to delete the file I recently downloaded but I didn’t know how to really get to it like I did before (my memory especially as a kid was a bit wonky) so he showed me, so we tried and tried deleting the .zips but we couldn’t because even trying to open up the file explorer would just automatically get closed almost instantly every single time.
My dad then looked at me told me he will try to get me a new computer next week because it’s obvious the one I’m currently using is a bit screwed to say the least. I nod and my dad then leaves the room and I look back at my computer once again where now it’s locked under a pay wall of some sort with a low quality SpongeBob image on the left.
I can’t really exactly recall what the payment demanded was but I remember it was stupid high and it would tell me that if I didn’t comply all my files would be wiped and my computer would become unusable in just a few hours.
Accepting my fate, I just watched the counter keep counting down and after a few minutes I just went to go take a shower because nothing crazy like the weird popups were showing anymore.
..And that’s all I can recall. Sorry for the rather somewhat adruptish ending there but well, that’s all I can remember and I have been trying to search for the same website in recent days or virus with no luck, now the reason why I’m searching for it now is because well sometimes I got weird hobbies and I like to read about and research viruses, I’d like to clarify though that I don’t wanna make the mistake of downloading it again but I wanna see at least a documented instance of what I had experienced covered somewhere or at least a demonstration video of it but that doesn’t seem to be the case, it isn’t seen on any Youtube channels or any other video platforms at all, sure there are some close looking ones I can find but they are definitely not the same and so far I got no luck with finding whatever I got there.
Maybe that’s for the best?
