While Love Letter was devastating to the devices it was downloaded on, there were viruses that were funny, before the computer was such an essential part of everyday life.
One such case was a virus that demanded the user beat a high score in a notoriously difficult bullet-hell game, known as ‘Rensenware’. The original creator had not beaten it, but assumed it was possible; when he accidentally infected his machine attempting to tinker with it, he released a ‘patch’ with an apology.
BonziBuddy, a virtual desktop pet, was well-known for the wrong reasons: it would sing and talk, but only in an annoying text-to-speech voice. Even then, people still downloaded it as a novelty up until it was discovered that the purple ape was running spyware in the background.
Other viruses can incidentally mess with the audio and visual drivers on a computer (or put excessive strain on the GPU, in the case of BitCoin-mining viruses), causing crazy visual glitches and sounds to play when the user isn’t actually doing anything to cause it. Some deliberately go out of their way to cause it, like the SalineWin virus, another fairly well-known malware.
Some activate the webcam and claim to be watching you – something that’s concerning, yes, but not necessarily a sign anyone is actually actively watching you, because most webcams are very poorly secured and it’s pretty easy to write a script to simply turn it on and post a little text box saying it’s watching you. Many of them will do that even when not connected to the internet, rendering ‘watching you’ impossible. Don’t let malware run rampant, of course, in the off chance something is happening in the background that you don’t want to happen.
So what gives? Why are these ones mostly a nuisance, instead of the digital equivalent of a time bomb on a device? When did we go from ‘funny’ viruses to incredibly stressful ones? There was a time when a virus wasn’t such a massive headache: ultimately, the reason the viruses are so terrible today is because the computer has so much more critical info on it. In the earliest days of viruses, a computer would have games, some small programs (word processors, spreadsheets, et cetera) and maybe an internet connection. That connection may be used for a university’s portal, maybe some forums, maybe, possibly, email, but it wasn’t widely used. People who had other things were outliers. In short – not much worth stealing, a lot of things that would be an annoyance, but nothing that alone would allow someone to steal the computer user’s identity. There also wasn’t an easy way to send money for a long time, meaning there was no easy and anonymous way to demand a ransom.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20190401163117/https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/54282-bonzi-buddy-creator-settles-suit
