Nexxen wrote on 2026-06-04, 14:12:

Ping Pong virus and Ducros.
5.25" disks.

never heard of this Ducros before

Masaw wrote on 2026-06-04, 16:58:

Nexxen wrote on 2026-06-04, 14:12:

Ping Pong virus and Ducros.
5.25" disks.

never heard of this Ducros before

It came with a program, IIRC a calendar, that didn't work. After exiting the program we saw:

"Ducros virus is now installed"

After that nothing more.
My uncle came and gave it look but could not see anything. He came to give us a bigger HD and took that one back to his office.
Never heard of it again.

HD was a 40MB. Was a nice upgrade 😀 Good it happened when my dad saved everything expecting the change.

At school, where the calendar.exe program was copied from, another student told me they had the same in the pc room but nothing happened, but it was named Ducros.exe
There were a bunch of PC1512, no HD. The only PC1640 with EGA had the text in the colours of the Ducros spice brand.

That's it, maybe it was a joke.

Ping pong was funny though.

Nobody mentioned yet, that really insidious virus that was going round all the forums a while ago, though I think it originated on usenet..

"Honor system virus, please copy and paste to signature."

Nexxen wrote on 2026-06-04, 20:20:

It came with a program, IIRC a calendar, that didn't work. After exiting the program we saw: […]
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Masaw wrote on 2026-06-04, 16:58:

Nexxen wrote on 2026-06-04, 14:12:

Ping Pong virus and Ducros.
5.25" disks.

never heard of this Ducros before

It came with a program, IIRC a calendar, that didn't work. After exiting the program we saw:

"Ducros virus is now installed"

After that nothing more.
My uncle came and gave it look but could not see anything. He came to give us a bigger HD and took that one back to his office.
Never heard of it again.

HD was a 40MB. Was a nice upgrade 😀 Good it happened when my dad saved everything expecting the change.

At school, where the calendar.exe program was copied from, another student told me they had the same in the pc room but nothing happened, but it was named Ducros.exe
There were a bunch of PC1512, no HD. The only PC1640 with EGA had the text in the colours of the Ducros spice brand.

That's it, maybe it was a joke.

Ping pong was funny though.

There were hundreds of viruses (I refuse to call them viri) that did nothing but copy themselves into programs and maybe pop up and display something. Pick your favorite reasons: incompetence, virus kit kiddies, just getting noticed without doing harm, and you can call that reason a joke if you like. You could laugh them off until people started worrying about viruses with delayed payloads that might go off months or years later. Keep read-only backups and installers and you needn't worry much about all this. But it makes me wonder how many of us are running AV software on their DOS and old windows systems. 😀

Malik wrote on 2026-06-04, 12:32:

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. 🤣

https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/keypress

mombarak wrote on 2026-05-31, 18:24:

I remember my most annoying and frustrating virus was my first one. I had my first personal computer with 11, a 486sx25 with 4MB […]
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I remember my most annoying and frustrating virus was my first one. I had my first personal computer with 11, a 486sx25 with 4MB of RAM. I somehow managed to get rid of Windows 3.1 and have a clean DOS installation and multiple DOS configurations to run all games I needed and then... when everything was just perfect... I got a copy of Comanche 1 from Novalogic from a friend because I definitely wanted to play that. Disk 1 or 2 had the DELWIN virus on it and from this point on I was infected.

The older brother of my friend organized a McAffee antivirus or something similar but because we did not have internet, we were not sure how good the success rate would be. It did not work or I was skeptical and after long back and forth I convinced myself to format my hard drive and start clean. For someone who never did this before, this was scary because there was this thought of destroying your only 2500 German Mark Computer which means you have nothing afterwards.

It worked and I learned that you cannot break hardware with software installations, at least not the harmless stuff.

Did you run into similar ugly or funny situations?
PS: My friend claims he still owns this floppy disk... 😒

https://wiw.org/~meta/vsum/view.php?vir=382
one of the few viruses I included when I first wrote my antivirus software back in '97.. this is a stealth multipartite virus, it infects the MBR of hdd and .EXE files

SiBurning wrote on 2026-06-04, 21:44:

Keep read-only backups and installers and you needn't worry much about all this. But it makes me wonder how many of us are running AV software on their DOS and old windows systems. 😀

You would also maybe think that pressed CDs would be safe, but there were instances like with Chernobyl/CIH in 1998 where a virus infected files distributed on magazine cover disks and demo scene CD collections. So you would probably be wise to check old CDs when you are using them in your retro boxes. Though also be aware that some "tweaky" virus checkers trigger on the definitions files of other virus tools, so if there are AV tools on the CD, false positives may occur.