The Legend of YouAreAnIdiot.org
9,284,476
Published 2021-10-20
The YouAreAnIdiot trojan horse, also known by its official name “Offiz” infected as many as 100,000 people, 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 continuing 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 YouAreAnIdiot go from exhausting tech support threads within online forums into becoming an internet legend?
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 YouAreAnIdiot 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 earliest confirmed website it showed up on was known as youdontknowwhoiam(dot)org. So what did the virus actually do?
Well, it wasn’t technically a virus at all. It didn’t use your computer to 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 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. 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.
Video contains:
- Bright flashing lights
Viewer discretion is advised.
Website: www.nationsquid.com/
Merchandise: teespring.com/stores/squids-s...
Google +: just kidding.
Discord: discord.gg/CY9VWjfEG3
Beauty Flow by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5025-beauty-flow
License: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
A special thanks to these patrons:
- Nathan Inkenbrandt
- Swingadee
- Winolotonolo
- Tommy Sharp
- Sl0rg
ENJOY THE PROGRAM.
All Comments (21)
-
Follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/NationSquidYT Beatles channel (I will upload video essays there soon I swear!): www.youtube.com/channel/UCGxwZk3oX6l_LpuDpC_2Yjw Thanks for watching, everyone! More to come!
-
I miss when viruses were basically just to prank you, and not to involve your PC in organized crime.
-
No one else thinks it's actually creepy as hell? The music is weirdly distorted, the voice sounds inhuman and the faces on the black background are staring into your soul.
-
I think if I'd encountered this back in the day I would have just cried for hours.
-
My brother and I were at my dad's friend's house for his band practice back when this was very popular. They were all downstairs in the basement while we were upstairs messing around and playing silly games on the computer. He randomly told me to search up something called YouAreAnIdiot...i was really confused and I was about 11 or so. I typed it into the search bar and this popped up. Tons of tabs popped up and the music got louder, I had no idea what was going on and my brother was starting to freak out aswell. Finally we powered off the computer but our adrenaline was skyrocketing and we were shaking. I had nightmares for about a month and my brother apologized so many times and said that he was just curious on what it was. Thats the very fond memory i have of this crazy website..and I'll never forget it lol
-
Osu players be like: “it’s my time to shine”
-
Pulled this on a school computer back in elementary. I forget why I did it but I got lunch detention for a week
-
I just know that a certain flower would love this
-
thank you for providing the flashing light warning. it helped me so that I knew to turn on my lights so the contrast wouldn’t cause a seizure. I really appreciate that because I enjoy your content.
-
The guy who created this is a genius, singlehandedly taught a whole generation to not click an unknown file/link! xD
-
I "defeat" it back then by holding alt + f4 and closing all of them faster than it could replicate lol. Gave it the middle finger. Good times.
-
Oh man, never thought I'd hear that anxiety inducing song again- it's only a slightly higher pitch than my brain's very vivid memory of it 😅 I was probably 10 or 11 on addictinggames and mis-clicked on one of the unavoidable ads and my heart leapt out of my chest, i was so scared. After a minute of heart-racing panicking I force shut down, waited an hour and then was trembling in fear as I turned the computer back on. Man the relief I felt when nothing happened and I was in the clear- my dad is a tech guy and I don't think that was the first time I'd had to come to him in shame to fix the pop-ups I accidentally clicked on lol. Scared me straight, there was only one other time a couple years later when a rogue trackpad again misclicked on a banner ad on MySpace causing a ton of pop-ups. Other than that I was so careful to not go anywhere near banner ads for fear of accidentally clicking them 😅😅
-
The origin of the audio comes from the 1984 album Put It Where The Moon Don’t Shine by Rick Dees, a DJ from Memphis, best known for his song “Disco Duck”. It plays during the track “Candid Phone (Dog’s Funeral)”. Lost media found.
-
Now I'm curious where Farmers Insurance got their inspiration for their jingle.
-
As far as mid 2000's trolls go this was the most vanilla. Atleast it wasn't a party of lemons, a girl in a tub, a spinning of meat or a goat that can see.
-
Ahhhhh, I've been wondering about this virus for at least 3 years, i just heven't searched it up until now, you explained it all really well! I now know that that is NOT the place to go.
-
It was a really really great idea of the person who created this masterpiece. It teaches the user to be reaaaally attentive when browsing and not doing anything stupid because of the fear of viruses while being completely harmless itself.
-
To be fair, if you left your work unsaved before going to dodgy-looking links, this'd teach you a couple of valuable lessons without totaling your computer.
-
just imagine the creator, simply sitting and smiling at home, being the only one that knows that he is behind the 'virus'
-
I remember being a little kid and getting this on my computer. There was no way to exit out of it so I eventually panicked and unplugged my PC. When I booted my computer back up I got the dread of still having something on my computer. Eventually I got my computer cleaned and it turned out I had a lot of different viruses from spyware to trojans and worms. XP era malware gave me paranoia which I still have today. I'm always wondering if random CMD popups at boot or browser slowdowns are caused by a trojan.
