When you're white hat, but you feel a little silly sometimes
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Chaotic good.
I remembered back in the day, there was a virus where a small cat appeared on the screen and chase your mouse cursor. If it caught your mouse cursor, the computer would crash. It did no other damage. It was great fun.
On Linux we have a harmless version of that: Oneko.
Might just have to install this on the work computer today!
I did this once and it was quite funny. But because I work with text and the cat blocks the characters behind it, it got also annoying.
Yeah, same with text here. I tried the option to sit on top of the window in focus too, which is nicer. But as much as I love my non-maximized windows, my setup at work is a bunch of 1080p monitors. So even with terminal windows it works nicely to just fill the left or right half of the screen.
It doesn't work on Wayland. We need to go back.
looks in Task Manager
"What the hell is 'suspicious.exe?'"
Or what the shit is syssrv32.exe?
Congratulations you have successfully identified the ransomware in this training exercise.
This experience brought to you by PwnMe
oh man. back in school we made a lot of dumb shit like this. friend got a box of 128mb usb sticks with erroneous branding and we put autorun 'viruses' that just spammed popups, opened the cd drive, played weird sounds, etc.
same day as we left them in various places in the school there was an announcement not to use "fake usb sticks" found in the building because they have viruses
Were you vacationing in Iran in 2008-09 by any chance?
Funny little viruses like playing sounds, opening CD drives, and dismantling the industrial infrastructure of a nations nuclear program.
I don’t understand this reference I’m stux
Back when Iran has been actively developing a nuclear program (they claimed it was for power plants), the US has infiltrated the uranium enrichment facility by secretly delivering a malicious USB stick that was then put into a computer and caused centrifuges to break by overriding the speed settings.
Oh I’ve heard of stuxnet it was just a joke hence the “I’m stux” part. But this is good for those who aren’t as aware thanks!
Ah, I see!
I wrote one in VB class that would play the system beep sound in a loop. The computers were so shitty that that would overheat them in a few seconds as they screamed.
You tortured the computers to death
I put them out of their misery. They were tortured for yeas before I showed up.
Welcome to the botnet!
Anon just started mining crypto.
These days this should not be an issue for emulation, but unfortunately it is since the solution takes a small amount of education, and because there are no legal, official places to buy roms other than the rare packaged emulator re-release that some companies make.
I'd guess most people here already know how to verify a checksum, but the average computer user does not. It's a skill that should be taught in schools.
But roms don't have an official distribution channel, so to know that one is good, you have to rely on community projects like Redump and No-Intro. Compare your hashes to theirs, and you should be good. A tl;dr: just do a search of "myrient", as that's the most recommended place to get correct roms these days.
There are practical purposes beyond avoiding malware too. The RetroAchievements project makes it possible for people to earn achievements in emulators, but for it to work properly you need to use exactly the right versions of a rom that each game supports. RA relies heavily on RetroArch, and RetroArch uses it's own method for hash verification, so here's a guide for getting started with that.
It's a good warning (you hope). You clearly grabbed shady software. If you're lucky it's not malicious, this time.