- [Narrator] If you
grew up in the mid-2000s and spent a lot of your
time on the deeper parts of the internet, there is a good chance that you remember this iconic sound and visual. ♪ "You Are An Idiot" ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ♪ Seems like a basic flash animation, but quite a number of people were talking about it at the time. And there's a chance you
were one of those people who clicked on this, wondering what all the fuss was about. Why does something so useless exist? And then it hits you like a train. Now, there are more windows popping up displaying the same animation,
and it's much louder. And you can't press the
little X on your browser because the windows are
moving all over the place. And when you do catch one,
the windows just multiply. You try using Alt+F4 in control queue, but that doesn't shut down your browser, it just creates even
more of these windows. Before you know it, there are dozens if not hundreds of browsers just bouncing around your screen. It's too loud to even concentrate, no hotkeys or buttons work anymore. Your computer's using so many resources it can barely operate
at a functional speed, but you didn't know any better. A YouTube comment told you about this and at sense of urgency just really picked at your curiosity. But now you wish you had just
done what you've been told, and now there's no escape. You forcefully shut down your computer by pressing hard on the power button. And now everything seems
to be back to normal, but then you realize that
history paper you left open, it's due tomorrow, and you
never got a chance to save. And now all of your hours
of hard work is gone. You really are an idiot. You really shouldn't
feel all that bad though as you are not alone. The "You Are An Idiot" Trojan Horse, also known by its official name, Offiz, infected as many as 100,000 computers. 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 continued 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 "You Are An Idiot" go from exhausting tech support
threads within online forums into becoming an internet legend? I think answering this
question is what makes this particular computer
virus very interesting. The answer is we don't know. This malware found itself
infiltrating thousands of machines and consequently becoming
a meme in the 2000s, yet nobody knows where it came
from, who created it, or why. The origin of "You Are An Idiot" is one filled with mystique. At this point, it was just so long ago and now little record survives. But with the information we do have, we can formulate theories
and get a general idea of what most likely happened. So, where do we think "You
Are An Idiot" came from? 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 "You Are An Idiot"
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 website in question is debated as secondary sources of the
time either lack information or just completely
conflict with each other. But what seems to be the
most plausible theory is that it came from
what I like to call in a ooh la la website. This is a PG-rated YouTube video, but I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. But it makes perfect sense
why you would want to put a malicious program here. It is a great place to
quickly gain notoriety. I mean, adult websites have
been around since forever, since the internet barely even existed. Naturally, this is the kind of website that is going to attract a lot of people. People who in the present
moment are desperate, are in a certain mood that
makes them do stupid things they otherwise wouldn't do,
like click on a dangerous ad. This would be what ultimately
got people talking about it, but the program wouldn't
really start to take off until several months
later when it is re-posted on a new website, youdon'tknowwhoiam.org. This is the earliest confirmed record of "You Are An Idiot" existence. Anything before that is speculation, but this we know for sure. And it's at this point where online forums start talking about it, but the aforementioned
theory does make sense in tying all this together,
because at the end of the day, how did anyone even know that
this weird long domain name existed in the first place? So, what did the virus actually do? Well, it wasn't
technically a virus at all. It didn't use your computer
to replicate itself and 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 have 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 as well. 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. Word was now really getting
around about the program, whether it be from those trying
to warn other users about it or through dares and chain letters, "Whatever you do, do not go
on youdontknowwhoiam.org." Of course, who would
listen to such a thing, it's notoriety led to multiple variants of the virus to be created, which of course led to
rumors and conjecture. Many users claim that the
program would even delete all the files from your computer and cause irreversible damage. It had quickly come out that
these claims were false, at least for the version of the virus directly from the website, but at the same time,
they kind of weren't. The virus may not have gone
in and deleted stuff itself, but it's invasive existence
often left users with no choice, but to jump ship, the damage was indirect. Users were typically forced
to shut down their computer. Of course, things would be
back to normal after that. But if you left something
open that you didn't save, you were out of luck. In some cases, your file
was permanently corrupt from an abrupt shutdown,
that data was lost forever. And if you were really unlucky, you could even end up with
a version of the virus that was programmed to
activate at start up. In that case, you were pretty much doomed. It all just depended on what
version of the virus you got from where, luckily
there were some factors of the time which prevented
"You Are An Idiot" from becoming as devastating
as it could have been. Depending on the hardware in your PC, you were a lot safer if you
were running Windows XP. You could just right click
and select closed group or even open task manager, and it would go away pretty quickly just as long as you did
this before the payload. Unfortunately, a lot of people running XP were not aware of this feature and would just end up having
their computer freeze on them, and then it would be too late. If you were running Windows 2000 or some 9x version of Windows, which a lot of people
still were at the time, you were especially unlucky. You kind of just had
to deal with the pain. XP was arguably the safest OS that you would want to get this Trojan on. This possibly could even be a reason for why the virus didn't
infect that many people. By 2003, Windows XP had the
majority OS market share and was already statistically
significant the year prior. A lot of people, and
eventually most of them were using the safe operating system. "You Are An Idiot" was nothing
more than a practical joke to pull on your friends if
you knew what you were doing, but any slight mishap
had dire consequences despite its chaotic and
resource hogging presence. The "You Are An Idiot"
virus was soon regarded as a rather humorous program
and became somewhat respected in the online space. It was less of a malicious
piece of software in more of a work of art that
needed to be immortalized. In 2004, a new website was
dedicated to the program, youareanidiot.org,
created by Andrew Ragnar. It was a mirror version
of youdontknowwhoiam which had now been bought
out by another company. This new site included a much
safer version of the program while still obnoxious and distracting and continued to fool people, did not use up nearly as
many system resources. It allowed the program to be preserved as a sort of internet artifact and its influence would
spread to YouTube in 2006, or it would soon become a joke
for a whole other community. While we don't know who created it or their reason behind creating it, "You Are An Idiot" was part
of the many growing pains of the internet. It showed that as the
good parts of the internet gets smarter, so do the bad. The internet was seemingly
growing too fast, introducing new problems and
new solutions too quickly. And based on the reactions of many people, that was a reason to be afraid. But when the aftereffects of those things started to show up, it all
turned out not to be that bad and rather than be afraid of
the sudden constant change instead we can not only
continue to learn from it, but maybe sometimes even laugh about it. And now, it is time to actually
see the program in action. I'm going to be doing something a little different this time. I will be demonstrating this malware twice on two different versions of Windows, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, just to really show how
significant of a difference the OS can make on the level of severity that this virus can have. As always, please make
sure you confidently know what you are doing before even attempting to run a program like this. Whether it's benign or not, you never know what can happen, be safe. With that being said, let's get started. As you can see here, I am
currently running Windows 2000. Looking at my clock. it is the night of New Year's Eve, 2002. And now we are going
to navigate the website containing the Trojan. Let's go ahead and open Internet Explorer. Now, just imagine hearing
about youdontknowwhoiam.org and being told to go on it. You have no idea what it is, but your curiosity is taking over. Here we go. Let's surf the web. (keyboard clicking) ♪ You are an idiot ♪ Now, here is the flash video which plays on loop indefinitely. Just as the user realizes that the website is nothing special and they
start to get a headache, they will go ahead and X out. Uh-oh, that is way louder
than I expected. Ouch. Okay. As you can see, it is
going to be quite difficult catching these windows to close them. And once you do, you are
going to get six more. Look at that. The more I do this, the more these windows will grow exponentially. Six windows, times six
more windows and so on. I'm currently pressing Alt+4
but it's not shutting down. It's just adding more of the windows. Wow. Look at that. Well, as you can see, I've gotten myself in kind
of a predicament here. We've tried everything
else and it didn't close. Now, we're going to do
a force program shutdown with task manager. I can't even open task manager. It's so stuck. Okay. We got task manager open. Let's go ahead and end all the processes. Well, it's gone, and the OS is hung. Can't click anything, nothing. For a user, this would often
be the point of no return. Now, you're gonna have to shut the computer down physically. If you have any work open,
let's hope you saved. As I mentioned, you were much better off in terms of saving your data if you were running this program on XP. Of course your results may vary depending on your
hardware, RAM allocation, how many processes you have running, and a million other things. There's no official data to
confirm that this is the case, but based on what I've tested, I really do believe this is true. And you should always believe
everything that I say, because I know everything. Now let's go run this on XP. Same as before, go to our website. Flash animation. Let's go ahead and generate
more of these windows like last time. Right click, close group. That didn't work. Okay. Still not working. Task manager. There we go. As you can see, we didn't
have to shut anything down. Windows XP, one, Windows 2000, zero. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe and hit
the notification bell so that you never miss a future video. Also, be sure to check out
my brand new Beatles channel, Retrology, providing content
all about the Fab Four. Hope to see you there.
