Hi,

The first x86 virus I remember to have encountered was Cruel(https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/cruel), the most annoying was One Half(https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/one-half).
As the description on the linked page says Cruel was easy to beat, just boot from a clean floppy and use SYS on the drive. One Half was a real problem, it is basically the ancestor of the current Ransomware viruses, it encrypted enough of the disk that data loss was basically guaranteed if no backups were made or until Anti-Virus vendors figured it out how to decrypt the data it encrypted.

My PC got infected by the Natas virus around 1995. I had an outdated version of McAfee as the only protection, so it's no wonder the PC was infected with all the pirated stuff I used to install back then, trading floppies with friends and all that. It wiped my entire hard drive, the "OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND" error message was quite a shock.

I was 14 at the time, and while I had some experience with the PC I didn't realize what had actually happened until I took the computer to my brother's so he could look into it (he was working as an Electrical Engineer for IBM back then). My main concern about the incident was losing the original version of a book written by my father that my family was trying to get published (he had passed a few months before all this). Luckily my brother was able to clean the virus and run Norton Disk Doctor to recover the files, so nothing of value was lost.

The only other virus I got infected with was a worm during the early XP era (around 2002-2003) that made the PC incredibly slow. But I'll blame Microslop for that one, as it was the time when you could get infected just by going online due to vulnerabilities in Windows RPC code.

When i was about 9 years old I put in a copied disk of Skyshark from my dads floppy storage container and it had a virus on it, I don't remember what the virus did or how it was fixed though. From what I remember it was a boot disk and there was a blue warning box that came up (probably BIOS level virus detection) but I had no idea what was going on so continued past the warning because I wanted to play the game.

I dodged bullets like Neo for nearly a decade before some used disks got me in '99 with "Stoned"... MSAV and MWAV were up to date enough at 5 years old to deal with that one easy enough.

More of a doozy came a couple of years later, when I encountered an unlisted virus... 9x machine behaved oddly, saw bad blocks being created in the same place on all volumes... hmmm, sneaky bugger huh? I got a sector editor and dug those out but there was still some shenanigans going on, found suspicious processes and killed them and their source exes, zipfiled an example... was feeling fairly confident I had stopped it. Two weeks later the official virus defs start dropping, think I was using Kaspersky at the time and a free Norton version, confirm what that sucker did and I had captured it. It had 2 names... both of which I am blanking on right now. Bugger, I was telling someone about it 5 years back and could remember name then.

Edit: been churning in the back of my mind trying to remember more detail. I think it got into system32.dll and I had to replace that from a clean system or pull it out of .cab . Then also I think until virus engines themselves were updated, although they could detect it, you needed a removal tool... or to pick it apart by hand like I did. I am thinking it maybe was getting around by email attachments, before that was super common, though IDK if I am confusing it with another one.

While Windows 98 was being finished, I was working on ****** antivirus. Naturally, we constantly infected computers at work to test our code. I also had four computers at home and would play with the company's catalog of 8000+ viruses. You just want to be careful to segregate known good copies and only use them on known good hosts. (And spend a lot of time rebuilding.) Since I was infected all the time, my story will be just a wee bit different.

One piece I worked on was a DOS driver loaded in config.sys. It would look for viruses, try to clean them, report, and ask whether to halt or continue on errors. On our first test, the QA engineer picked just about the simplest virus ever: a dropper that would write over any file loaded. We infected the host from Windows, ran our installer, rebooted, and watched the entire OS, our own executable and all our data disappear until the program or DOS reloaded some code segment and the computer halted.

i had several encounters of the computer viral kind in the early 90's back in high school. during that time i didnt own a personal computer yet but in the school lab where we brought 5.25" diskettes. but the most notable was back in '96 when I got my own 486DX4 PC. the DIE_HARD.4000 virus from Indonesia was epidemic in our school, so basically my pc got infected too. however, antiviruses were struggling to remove this virus since it is so infectious and stealthy. one thing most of them don't offer is resident virus deactivation. which is why i created my own

Michelangelo. I still have a few floppies with a sharpied MICHELANGELO on them

Cant remember the name exactly but it was a DOS virus that hid in the bootsector on the HDD and would infect the bootsector of any disks put into the floppy drives, IIRC it would after a set number of disk infections trigger its payload and destroy the HDD bootsector.

Destroying any disks used on that machine and formatting the HDD was the only proven remedy.

Truly some DOS viruses were nasty POS and back then you didn't always have a AV that could remove them or even afford the AV that could.

Edit - It was memorable only because I had at the time never see a DOS virus behave in that sneaky way, it was totally invisible until it had infected enough disks at which point it was very visible, a lot of viruses at the time made themselves known pretty quickly and were not as destructive to the HDD, usually they simply caused damage to floppies and programs or were a nuisance but not damaging.

The most memorable for me would have been the Demo scene bombs over on the AMIGA which would play a scene demo with music and force a reset to use the machine again but never caused much damage.

Got infected with One Half (probably, judging by its behavior).
My pc was not the fastest one, and in couple of years you'd feel every delay and know every sound it makes.
At some day I've noticed unusual hdd stepping sounds just before the DOS would boot, it wasn't there before.
Dr.Web at the time already knew how to cure it, so got rid of the virus without losing the files.

My own PC was clear from the infections from the start, but I remember my pal's PC being infected with the variant of Weelsof trojan.

It was very "funny" virus, because it used face of the (then-current) president of Poland, but they even misspelled "Policja"... xD

https://cert.pl/posts/2012/06/ten-komputer-zo … sh-na-100-euro/
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/ … n:Win32/Weelsof

leileilol wrote on 2026-06-01, 06:41:

Michelangelo. I still have a few floppies with a sharpied MICHELANGELO on them

can you send me image of this floppy?

In the early 90s there was an epidemic of Dir-II in the neighborhood kids computers and the local computer shop, which lasted a while until everyone removed it because of floppy sharing and copying. We didn't have any actual work on our computers back then, but it was annoying since our games stopped working.

Blaster aka MSBlast, in fact it's the only one I've caught excluding the time I intentionally tried an early cryptolocker or all the false positives in dodgy software or A TEXT FILE from the Xbox source code leak, go figure!

At the time computer magazines were still common, including in our family - and some angel mentioned there that you could go to services.msc > RPC > properties > when service crashes > restart service instead of restart computer 😁

Also RedV EasyInstall, allegedly an adware from an early example of "sponsored installers", though I never saw an ad from it, just a crap program autostarting and running in the background... Searching for the name points to UpdateStar (seemingly a Korean Softonic wannabe) allegedly having it available! 😁 😁

Parity Boot did the rounds in my area around 1993/94.

It would prevent PCs from booting and spread via floppy disks. It could be removed by using clean floppy recovery disks I seem to remember. I think I went nuclear on it at the time and just fdisked it from orbit (it's the only way to be sure).

I got my first virus after getting on the internet at the end of the 1990s. I don't remember what it was called, but it killed my Windows 98 installation. I later identified the original infected file and looked up the virus on the internet. I remember it just allowed remote access to the computer, so I assume someone was scanning IPs and found my computer's port open and decided to wreck it just for fun.

I remember something called "keystone" or "keypress" virus. I tried searching online now, but couldn't get any reference to it. My very first experience with a so-called computer virus. It messes up with the keyboard, I think. It blocks the keyboard input, iinm.

I think I got it when I was using my 286.

Of course, it came from a "shared" floppy from my friend. 🤣

Monkey.A

It would have been 1995 or 1996, and this MBR virus spread around my school PC's. One of my floppy disks with school Word docs got infected, so I accidentally brought it home. I don't remember how it was discovered at school, but those PC's had to be cleaned, and everyone was advised that it probably spread if you took floppy disks home. I was in my teens, and our first family PC (486SX/33) was about a year old. No anti-virus software, and I had no experience. I talked to my mom, then called some local PC stores. The tech at one of them confidently declared "yeah, I have whacked Monkey before" which was an odd verb to use in this context. 🤣

We dropped off the PC there, he made a backup copy of the hard drive, and used a shareware version of McAfee (for DOS) to remove the infection. He also found my "collection of photos" hidden in a Windows subdirectories, and made a vague reference to those getting "lost" in the process. I was probably mad about that, but he didn't get more specific or tell my mom, and did show me how to use McAfee to clean infected floppy disks.

I remember a very famous virus in China around 2006-2007 called "Panda Burning Incense" (Worm.WhBoy). It infected executable files and displayed a cartoon panda holding three sticks of incense. The virus spread rapidly through USB drives and local networks, overwriting files and making many systems unbootable. It was one of the most widespread malware outbreaks in China, and the author was eventually caught and sentenced to prison. Eventually, he wrote a program to remove the virus while in prison; since then, antivirus software has been immune to it, and some antivirus programs even use this as a selling point.

Ping Pong virus and Ducros.
5.25" disks.