The "You Are An Idiot" (Offiz) Trojan Horse was a notorious mid-2000s internet prank that exploited early web technologies like JavaScript and Flash to overwhelm users with pop-up windows, becoming an internet legend due to its mysterious origins and disruptive impact.
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- [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
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Also, be sure to check out my brand new Beatles channel,
Retrology, providing content all about the Fab Four.
Hope to see you there.
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