So back when I was a little kid... Wait, wait, wait Hold on... *Muffled* I'm looking like a smurf down here. You think anyone's gonna take you seriously sitting there like a hobbit? Ah, so you guys joke... I-... so *BOOM* So back in my day when computers look more like microwaves, The internet was like the Wild West. Fresh and unknown. it was the age of LimeWire, AIM, MySpace, 3d pinball, this iconic dancing banana that could demolish your kpop opaz (bts career ended) and Microsoft startups be looking like this. Oblivious to the dark side of the internet, I was just going around looking at new sites and learning new things every day. (mOst iNtEreStIng) Holy shit! Is that a Club Penguin moneymaker? Granted, I was a big club penguin nerd back then. But this thing was beautiful. (the angels have come from heaven uwu) No surveys, no scams, nothing. Hot singles near me. What in the... 0.2 miles away? Y'all bugging, I'm calling the police! Jailbreaking iPhones? Yeah, sometimes we need that illegal stuff in our lives. I was pretty hyped knowing all the things I could download online. Fortunately, the developers make these apps free. We called these guys... goats. The heroes without capes, The "we need more people like you nowadays" But as the saying goes... "There wouldn't be any heroes without some lying sons of bitches out there" Some of these websites sucked! The only reason they existed was to give free virus handouts. Yes Thank all you goofy trolls and hackers for giving what nobody asked for. Okay, let me tell you the story now. So one time when I was a kid, I was playing one of those online incremental games where you get more currency the more you click on it. (cOoKiE cLiCkEr hAs cOmE bAcK) Yeah, it wasn't even real money but for some reason it was such a big ass deal to me. Something about that game just felt like crack. Anyways after like two minutes I felt this surge of laziness kicking in (hand be growing a 6 pack) and I didn't feel like clicking anymore. So my bum ass went on Google and search for an auto clicker to do the job for me. I clicked the first result and you know what? It was a solid looking website for its time. And so I clicked download. At first I thought I was a pretty big file for an auto clicker, but I was ready to risk it all for that good good instant gratification. When it finished downloading, I opened the RAR file and there were mad files inside of it. I clicked autoclicker.exe and you will not believe what was in there. As soon as it opened up, There was this blaring alarm sound playing with some cursed looping gif of someone's schlong going clockwise. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Umm.. Hello?! Is everything okay up there? SHIT Yes, ma'am. We good. don't need to check up or anything. You best believe I turned down those speakers ASAP. There was this counter of how many times this banana was going around in circles, which I thought was completely unnecessary Cause ain't nobody keeping count of that. Meanwhile, I was just trying to close the damn thing. Tragic. Just great. Now my computer wasn't responding anymore. Not on the X button, to start button, no files, the whole thing was frozen. Like you know you're done screwed up when this arrow stops changing into this hand. After like the 87th time it swung around, there were some red letters that popped up saying "You're really enjoying this, aren't you?" Well, you're cheeky fuck. Now I had PTSD for life. And I've had it with this clownery. I unplugged the whole thing and restarted it. I laid back thinking it was all over, but then my luck took a nosedive and this whole thing just went blue screen on me. Say sike right now I was using the family computer too, which meant everyone else's files were also poofed off the face of the earth. So, you know, I was in some deep shit. I just knew I had to fix it before pops came home, but nope. It was too late. This one was on me. I apparently didn't learn from my mistake, because I did the same thing again not long after. I was trying to find a screen recorder to make videos before I knew what the hell unregistered hypercam was. Let's see... Free screen recorder download... Yet again, there were multiple websites while I had no reliable source, so I just clicked whatever link there was. And ka-ching... The Internet was great again... ...until I opened the program and it was more bullshit and spyware. Mmm, I'm really loving life right now. The difference with this virus still was that for each pop-up you closed ...ten more came up! Scam programs are installing themselves by the minute. And by then I Lost 15 gigabytes of my precious but crappy mspaint doodles, which I kept like trophies. Plus all my songs and photos. You know I was hell uptight. I tried to find the source of the virus and delete all the shitty boot-like programs, but this was impossible! They were multiplying like roaches. I thought it couldn't get any worse, but then the majesty of pop-ups opened up with a loud alarm. Enough! At least play me some, uhh... ...you know even getting rickrolled will be better than this. On the top of the message it was all in Russian or something. It's always got to be the Russians, ah? On the bottom though there was an English translation that graciously took their time to write out. How thoughtful of them. I read through and it's at something along the lines of... ,,blah blah blah, your personal files are encrypted,
You have 24 hours to pay a $500 ransom to..." What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, You know what? Hold up, okay,? Let me just take out my wallet, so that I can give you your... 👌😎 Well that did a whole lot of nothing. if I could physically mess with this pop up this is probably the closest I could get to it. Okay, besides that though, $500? Who got that kind of moola? Even if moneybags magically fell from the sky, there was zero guarantee of return of my lost files. It's more likely they'd take it all in bail. And no, I did not even think about asking my parents for money, Cuz that's a death wish right there. They let my dumb ass loose all those files and give me a can of whoop-ass. Back then I didn't know about backup services like Dropbox, or Google Drive. That wasn't really a big thing And so I said adios to all my files, and let them all go. Apparently this kind of virus is called the ransomware. They'd corrupt all your system files and ask for money in return of those files. Valid way of swindling children. Good job. I'm assuming by now, most veteran Internet users have been hit with the viruses, hacks, scams, and/or blackmails at least once or twice in their life. I found out my brother was also blackmailed not long ago on the Deep Web. And if you don't know what the Deep Web is... it's like the hidden part of the internet that you can't find on a regular Browser like Firefox or Chrome. They sell things on the black market, like drugs, weapons, Assassins¿? If you thought the internet was already wild, fact is that you're only at the tip of the iceberg. I don't recommend you digging through it firsthand, cause there's a lot of crazies on there. How much you wanna bet that florida man's the one running these sites. So my brother was just bored one day on the computer. He stumbled on some deep web videos on YouTube but didn't really believe what they were saying and decided to have a look-see for himself. A few hours later, he went into deep and he ended up finding one of those, eeh... grow a Civilization type of games. And if he wanted to play they required him to sign up with a sketchy amount of personal info. Full name, date of birth, address, phone number, Social Security number... All this for a game? Give me a break! There is zero reason any game developer would need this kind of info. There's nothing to worry about, because there is no way anyone would fall for this crap- *asthma intensifies* Apparently, he wasn't the only one playing the game. and there were loads of others who signed up too. Yeah, I can't believe it either. Soon after he signed up the developer of the game opened a pop-up message for every single member, and that's when he started trapping them In his cage. The message said something like: ,,You must play this game at least once daily, You also gotta pay this minimum amount of currency for this game to remove the whistle on your personal info leaked. Don't try anything funny." And every so often this threat would come up as a reminder. This shit people do for money nowadays, huh? So naturally my brother and the others were scared. They realized they were goners now, and they felt the pressure to show up every day. He slaved away for 2 years. 2 whole ass years. Doesn't matter if he got bored of it, tired of it, rain or shine he had to show up every day to take away the risk of getting personal info leaked. One day, he tried logging in again, but the site just disappeared. The game didn't exist anymore. Nobody knew what the hell happened Maybe the Creator decided he had enough money, and figured it was time to lay off. Or maybe he found some Jesus. Or the FBI finally caught up to him. Hope it was the lader. Either way, my brother and the others were free. He didn't need to play that game like he was in a sweatshop no more. He never bothered telling our parents, but he did tell me a year later. I'm guessing he hesitated because of the same consequences I was holding back from. If we're being honest, he spent a good chunk of money on it. And ever since then he never went back on the Deep Web. Sometimes we got curious and put our noses where we're not supposed to. This is why you gotta be careful even nowadays with all the crazies out there. It doesn't really matter if you're a kid or a grown-ass adult, these kind of things are only learned through experience. And here are the lessons we learned today: Number one - don't download any files from shady-ass websites. Number two - for the love of God please get yourself a backup. And number three - play stupid games, win stupid prizes Sometimes too good to be true is too good to be true. And that's it. I hope none of y'all make the same mistakes we did.
