How to: Make 4 fake computer viruses!

Why not have some fun and prank your friends? There are several kinds of fake virus messages you can make. I will discuss 4 of them:

1. Fake error message

This one is by far, the easiest one to make and all you have to do is to make a new text document with notepad, type msg * YOUR MESSAGE and save as anything.bat. As always, make sure that you select All files instead of Text Document.

2. Forced shutdown

This will display a custom error message and start a countdown which will shut down the computer.

Right-click your desktop and create a new shortcut.
Paste the following code into the Location box in the Create Shortcut menu:
shutdown -s -t 30 -c “Your message here“

Replace 30 with the length of the countdown you want (in seconds) and place your custom error message between the quotes. Click next and name the shortcut to something the victim would be likely to click on such as “Internet explorer” or “My Documents”, etc.

Next you’d want to change the icon. Right-click on the shortcut you made and click properties. Find the Change Icon button and click it. Choose a suitable icon for the name you chose earlier.

And that’s all! Now you just have to sneak the shortcut onto the victim’s desktop and run!

Note: to stop it, open Run from the start menu and type shutdown-a.

3. Endless Command prompt windows

This will open up a series of command prompt windows that will never end.
The basic idea is that there are two .bat files that open the other one when opened, so the other one opens the first one again and the windows just won’t stop coming.

How to do this:
1. Fire up notepad and type: start 2.bat
2. Save it as 1.bat (make sure you choose all files when saving it)
3. Make another new text document and type: start 1.bat
4. Save it as 2.bat into the same folder as the other one.

All you have to do to start it is to click on either of them.

The only way to stop it is to wait for the windows to become so numerous that they are a group on the taskbar. Then you can use Close group to get rid of the bastards.

4. Fake Command prompt viruses

These are also a good way to make the victim believe that a worm is gnawing at their hard drive and that they can’t do anything to stop it.

Open up notepad and type @echo off

• To make text appear, type it after an echo tag.
• To have the the commands wait for the user to press any key type pause

(Note: if you write pause >nul it won’t display Press Any key to continue…)

• To have a complete high-speed description of files in the drive of the .bat file, type dir /s
• You can also initiate any other command we covered earlier, such as shutdown, error message, etc.

And why no include all of these in one fake virus?

For example:

I can’t post the batch files here, as sharing .bat files over the internet is illegal.