Revisiting Windows XP's Most Annoying Virus.

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]You are AN IDIOT.

[00:00:05]YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

[00:00:10]YOU ARE AN NOW I DON'T NORMALLY INTRODUCE myself here and there, but my name is I want more cheese and yes, that is my legal first name and last name definitely not sarcastic in this spot. But anyways, welcome everybody to a new series on this channel where I investigate and revisit a bunch of old viruses scattered across the internet. And of course, the main portion that I'll be serving on the table for you is a little bit of nostalgia, but also some teaching on the side. Without further ado, we're going to get straight into this virus. Now I already have a Windows XP virtual machine set up for this occasion and you should see a very very messy desktop in front of our faces. This genuinely took me so long to figure out solely for the reason that the virus is named You Are an Idiot and it's 20 plus years old. The steps I had to go through are all in this folder where the original URL is of course expired, so it does not work anymore and even the web archive version of this website did not want to work until I had to download Google Chrome.

[00:01:20]Which Microsoft Edge is really bad in this version of Windows. All we need to do from here now is to just grab this link and open up our local Chrome EXE.

[00:01:29]Paste the link on the address bar, which I've already done a few times before this. Please cover your ears cuz this is intended to be loud and a big epilepsy warning to those people watching. Click off before it gets too crazy. We're already We're already loading inside the website and there you have it, You Are an Idiot. Sound should be playing at the moment right Yep, there it is. This is a very old website, I'm telling you and by the sounds, it's very very annoying and mocking you straight in front of your screen. Now, I think if you try to click off here, it'll play a Yeah, there it is. It'll play a bunch of sounds and your desktop will become very laggy and bouncy. Also, please pay attention to the Chrome tabs on the bottom here.

[00:02:10]Holy, this is very loud. Let me lower this down for you guys. Okay, finally, I can catch a breather. So, you could see a bunch of Chrome tabs there. It says six, but once you try to close one off, sorry, I clicked the notepad here. But, once you try to close one off, it'll start to open more up. Can I please stop clicking the notepad? There we go. It'll See, it just duplicated that. So, if I keep doing it, it'll See, it just keeps making more and more Chrome tabs. I'll do it one more time so you guys can pay a closer attention to this cuz I did mess up a few times here, but there you go. It just went up from 21 to 27. We're going to go to our local task manager here and show you what's happening in the background. So, you see a bunch of Chrome tabs opening, and if you try to end one of these tasks, it'll then open up more. Heading over to the processes tab, you can already see some Google Chrome instances down here where it's draining a bunch of your RAM.

[00:03:04]And if you try to close all the groups down here, it will simply duplicate that whole number. The system is currently going into a big struggle, so the only thing that we can do right now is to technically restart. And that's what most people back in the day had to really do with their systems, losing most of the progress they were currently doing on that specific computer. And we're back to our beloved system where I didn't lose a bunch of precious data, but a bunch of people out there have.

[00:03:33]So, now, how does this virus work, and can you really stop it within just the first few seconds of it happening? Well, if you go back to the website here after we literally got demolished by it, if you simply click this red X over here to access the site settings for this particular one, you can eventually scroll down until you reach a point where it says pop-ups. Make sure to check this option that says do not allow any site to show any more pop-ups. And from now on, if you go back to that original website, you can simply not have anything on. After all those changes, you can technically reload the website, and there you have it. Nothing will pop up back in your desktop, and you are particularly safe. But of course, people never had this option inside their browser when the virus was currently happening in 2002. So, we can all genuinely agree that this somewhat of a Trojan had some people actually terrified. Let's all be thankful that this virus alone isn't so malicious, because if it was, then a lot of computers would be harmed in the making.

[00:04:33]This would have alone also indicated a bunch of people not to click on anything in the internet, because anything could also go wrong. Anyways, I hope I simplified and taught you something about the You're an Idiot virus that was going on back then. And if I'm missing something at all in this video, please point it out down below. Remember to always stay safe out there, no matter the occasion, and stay cheesy as much as you can. If a 2002 virus acts like this, we only know what we have now.