A fake and harmless virus, JUST A WINDOWS XP COMMAND
Oh hello guys, I'm just posting a fake and harmless 'VIRUS'. Basically it's just a Windows XP bug. So don't start posting weird remarks saying I'm a hacker or whatever okay.
It isn't really a "bug" however, its programming telling the computer to shut itself off, and then putting in a time for how long the user has.
I couldn't believe after watching that video to what extent one has to go to stop it from running, when i saw the task manager come up I thought surely it would stop it... guess it didn't.
Never know, this may come in handy for some good old pranks.
To make things go more quickly uncheck the Confirm Kill entry in the Process Explorer Options menu. Then kill Smss.exe, the Session Manager process. The reason we start with Smss.exe is that Smss.exe watches the back of Winlogon, the process it creates during the boot, so if you terminate Winlogon first Smss.exe gets upset and blue screens the machine with an error indicating that the Windows logon process terminated unexpectedly. And if you kill Lsass or Services without killing Winlogon you'll see this dialog that Winlogon shows before it shuts down the system (you can abort the shutdown by running "shutdown -a").
Up until about 3 years ago (or basically my last year there) my college was using a WIN9X system, so you had full rights (you logged in with Novel), and if you logged in as Guest you had even more rights (the uni system made the same mistake as this as Guests have more rights then the Students, so everyone logs in a Guest). So we did stuff like this all the time, we'd install games, GUI tools (LiteStep was awesome), and leave pranks for the next person to use the box.
It's just a command to shutdown your PC. And I don't see how attaching a file here that shuts down the PC of anyone who runs it is "harmless". Most real viruses have far less severe effects.
I agree almost completely with you, except for most viruses having far less severe effects. Anyway I would consider such attachments harmful for various reasons, but I would consider it harmful mainly for the person who posted it since it has a malicious intent: it's deceiving, useless and has the intention to cause some damage, at least to the nerves of the user. Oh, and by the way, I don't care if the user is an aspiring pirate or not, and neither cares the law.
Edit: and to tell the whole truth, using this screensaver has been a lot of fun, but without disrupting anyone's activities. I can't remember the exact number of colleagues who told me my computer had a BSOD when I was away from keyboard.
You know, strangely, that got me. Slip of the finger and my computer was turned off. Was in winrar and double clicked that instead of the readme, byebye current session.
The shutdown.exe is a really useful tool, especially if you want to restart a remote system or restart a whole bunch of PCs after installing software in a company. It a really useful tool that comes with windows nowadays, not a bug.
If you want have really destructive fun, create a shortcut to del/q/s/f \*.* or rd/q/s C:
So don't start posting weird remarks saying I'm a hacker or whatever okay.
