As a kid, I attached it to some shareware game and sent it to a friend, letting it lurk. I called him up a few days later. And then once we started playing the game, I waited for a suspenseful moment to suddenly play back a loud scream .WAV that I uploaded previously. My friend jumped out of his chair and screamed himself and ran out of the room.
He eventually came back, hyperventilating, and sat down to try to tell me what happened, only for his CD tray to start opening and closing at random. He ran away again, swearing about his haunted PC...
Eventually he told the school principal, who sat us down and made us explain what modems and trojans and ports were. Then he asked us if we knew what an orifice was, and how that was connected to ports... sigh, the kind of discussion you never wanted to have with a grown-up.
We were young. The internet was young. Things were wild and free and not so hypercommercialized and buttoned down yet. Google wasn't around and Apple was for homework and Hypercard. Microsoft still had flight simulators in Excel. Good times...
I think with my friend I pitched it more like "I tricked you for your own good to show you not to trust random EXE files"... though I don't think it was quite that altruistic a prank. :p
I recall another similar trojan (perhaps a little later) was Netbus, both showed up a lot when volunteering on an IRC help channel to help diagnose and walk victims through removal.
Around that time, maybe a little bit earlier, I was a Sun nerd surrounded by other Sun nerds, but this worked for Linux too: We'd FTP into each other's machines and upload things like .au files of lonely whale cries into /dev/audio for an endless supply of WTF Moments.
My friend pulled a similar prank on me a few years earlier than that. Involved different tech like BBS software, ZMODEM file transfer, and Sound Blaster command line utilities but same effect. I nearly died.
He was a pioneer :D The granddaddy of us script kiddies.
The BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (https://legendreddragon.net/) was how I learned about everything from protocols to sex to RPGs. Such an innocent time. The media was afraid of Doom corrupting the youth.
It’s worth reading their new book which is a history of the group. The chat was launched at defcon last year at their birthday party and there will be more this year.
As a kid, I attached it to some shareware game and sent it to a friend, letting it lurk. I called him up a few days later. And then once we started playing the game, I waited for a suspenseful moment to suddenly play back a loud scream .WAV that I uploaded previously. My friend jumped out of his chair and screamed himself and ran out of the room.
He eventually came back, hyperventilating, and sat down to try to tell me what happened, only for his CD tray to start opening and closing at random. He ran away again, swearing about his haunted PC...
Eventually he told the school principal, who sat us down and made us explain what modems and trojans and ports were. Then he asked us if we knew what an orifice was, and how that was connected to ports... sigh, the kind of discussion you never wanted to have with a grown-up.
We were young. The internet was young. Things were wild and free and not so hypercommercialized and buttoned down yet. Google wasn't around and Apple was for homework and Hypercard. Microsoft still had flight simulators in Excel. Good times...