In 2004, a website known as youareanidiot(dot)org rose to prominence across the internet, where it was home to what is now recognized as the You Are An Idiot computer virus (mostly known as "YouAreAnIdiot" or "Offiz"). However, many people first visiting the site had no idea what they were getting themselves into, and the story goes even deeper than that.
The YouAreAnIdiot trojan horse, also known by its official name “Offiz” infected as many as 100,000 people, and it was now making its way around the internet as a topic of heated discussion. A subject people immediately regretted becoming acquainted with, its presence just continuing to grow. It wasn’t long until people were claiming that their entire hard drives were being permanently erased and damaged beyond repair. What exactly was going on? How did the story of YouAreAnIdiot go from exhausting tech support threads within online forums into becoming an internet legend?
Well, properly answering that question requires a bit of historical context. We need to go all the way back to the year 2002. The internet is still in its fledgling phase, with the vestiges of the 90s, but it is growing at an alarming rate, as well as getting smarter and more sophisticated every day. This goes for both the technological aspects of the internet, as well as human behavior. The internet is becoming more because people are demanding more, for better and for worse. Not only was it improving on user convenience, it was learning to solve problems users had been yearning to get fixed for years, as well as solving problems users didn’t even know that they had. But this came at the expense of creating new problems, some of which were previously almost unheard of. Malicious programs were becoming smarter and more difficult to combat, as malware developers were learning from their past mistakes, and YouAreAnIdiot was a symptom of that.
But to really see how and why this was the case requires going into detail on how the virus rose to prominence and how it actually worked. The earliest form of the program showed up in early 2002, originally known by its more official name “Offiz” and it first appeared on a website. The earliest confirmed website it showed up on was known as youdontknowwhoiam(dot)org. So what did the virus actually do?
Well, it wasn’t technically a virus at all. It didn’t use your computer to spread to other ones. It was a trojan horse, a program that pretends to look nice and innocent, but causes harm to your computer once you activate it, but of course the vernacular for layman computer users is to call anything malicious a virus, so people just stuck with that. We mentioned that this virus was one of many components which formed from the early internet’s ongoing evolution, and that’s because it took advantage of a relatively new technology that was only becoming more complex by the year. This technology is called JavaScript. This wasn’t just writing code. This was the closest thing you could get to making something that was alive. Something that could almost think for itself. With JavaScript, you were playing God on the internet, so why not use it to cause mayhem as well? But this virus didn’t just take advantage of that. It also had another somewhat new and growing technology under its sleeve: the flash player. Combine these two forces and you are virtually unstoppable. Any user curious enough to click on the website’s window would be greeted with the famous animation we’ve all grown to recognize. Thanks to the JavaScript, any further attempt to exit the page, whether it be by refreshing or clicking the x button, will spawn six more smaller windows displaying the same animation, all playing at once. You’re not getting off that easy though. The script has programmed the windows to bounce around the page, so good luck exiting out, and even if you do get rid of one, six more will pop up once again. You now 11 windows on your computer calling you an idiot, and your speakers are just getting louder. You try using some hotkeys to forcefully shut down your browser, but now you just have text windows calling you an idiot. Before you know it, the windows have multiplied exponentially, and your computer’s resources are being used up. Your system is so slow you can barely even move the mouse anymore. You can’t even open task manager it’s so slow. Now you have no choice but to take the last resort and shut down your computer through physically pushing the power button.
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