shoutouts to that time I came back from work when I was still living with my parents to find my younger brother had used my pc on the sly and was probably looking for porn, and had installed a bunch of dialer malware onto my pc.
which couldn't connect to any phone line or anything because I was on a Cable connection, not ADSL or dialup, thus utterly negating most of the negative effects they might have had.
It was kinda adorable and a little sad really on the program's part.
@Felthry it's died out by now because of obsolecence of course, so if you manage to find any "in the wild" so to speak, it won't work as intended at all, but the idea was it would hijack your connection and force it to, instead of dialing to your ISP as normal, automatically dial a premium rate number on boot, and charge your phonebill extortionate amounts, which of course would usually rather rapidly end up with an internet account being turned off and your computer unusable online due to it.
@Nine ah, sounds like it was one of the older "let's fuck with people" types of malware rather than the "let's steal people's money" types that you see today
@Felthry yep. I actually had a real interest in older viruses and stuff because whilst they all pretty much did the same thing (expand file sizes of .com and .exe files, corrupt files, erase files, infect either the MBR or FAT (or other things I forget exactly), they each did it in subtly different ways, some worked harder at hiding themselves, some only did damage ACCIDENTALLY, and all invariably had interesting visual effects deliberately coded into them. It was fascinating.
@Felthry Back in the like, early 90s, or something, I had a Dr Solomon's Virus Encyclopedia book which detailed a wholllleee bunch of viruses, and in quite great detail, their effects, the exact manner in which they all infected files and systems, and what effects they'd have on them. It was nicely detailed and I loved just sitting and reading it.
@Nine what does dialer malware do?