I once had an interesting time with a special virus I will never forget. It was truly ingenious. See, my Norton subscription was up, and before I renewed it I was going about my daily internet filled life (after school of course). I don't remember exactly what happened, but here are a couple of things it had and did:
A fake BSOD: (Seriously, it was funny) A full-screen window would instantly open (covering the taskbar and everything, it was flawless), but not like when you full-screen a picture or game and the screen turns black for a second or two before displaying the image. You just had to hit escape, and it would minimize, then left click the icon to close it.
A fake start-up sequence tailored to your operating system: Same as above, but you could ACTUALLY log in, and all your files were "corrupted" or "moved" (A little message would also be on the bottom of the windows boot sequence that read "(I forgot the name of the virus) has restarted your systen on a attempt to protect your data". Pressing "Escape" five times would minimize it and it would instantly close.
Keeping your programs from opening: This is the best one yet. If you had ANY programs open, they would function flawlessly, until you closed them. Then, at whatever point you decided to reopen them a small message would pop up on your screen, making the "windows error" noise saying "The file you tried to open is infected. (program name) has terminated the operation" unless it was Internet Explorer... which was pretty funny.
All I had to do was restart in safe mode, renew my subscription and run a virus scan and it was gone. No harm done to my computer or my psyche, although if it had happened to a relatively computer illiterate person, they likely would have caved instantly.
One time I saw that I was being spied on by 17 people!
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