Man destroys his laptop by downloading 1000 viruses to see which anti-virus software can detect the most
There are countless ways hackers can try to get access to our personal data and information - normally, these involve phishing scams and misleading messages or emails.
What would happen, though, if you skipped past all of these scams and fake links, and actually went out of your way to download as many viruses as you possibly could?
That was the plane for YouTuber Basically Homeless, who fancied a 'boss fight' of sorts between a range of antivirus programs and every virus he could get his hands on.
He documented the process in an entertaining video that starts with an explanation of his aim - to see which antivirus was best in the least scientific way possible.
This process basically involves clicking on as many suspicious links as possible and looking for common programs in naïve places.
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It doesn't take long for his gaming laptop to be absolutely riddled with pop-up adverts, weird little programs and attention-hogging windows - but he doesn't really stop there, proceeding to download a deeply suspicious version of Minecraft, for example.
This also leads him to a website that actually has a directory of malware viruses available to download - rather than fishing around for viruses, he can simply get a whole bunch in one go.
This involves a lot of clicking 'yes' on pop-up dialogue boxes without looking into what they mean, granting huge access to his computer's systems and backend.
Something that is fairly disturbing about all of this is how many of the viruses appear to be targeted at younger users, disguising themselves as hack packages for the likes of Fortnite or Roblox, which tend to have younger user bases.
Still, Basically Homeless pushes through and soon has literally hundreds of programs downloaded, some of which seem to be able to multiply and download more on their own.
Having downloaded a few hundred of his own, he finally progresses to seeing what his antivirus programs can possibly manage to do against this tide.
From Norton to McAfee, Bitdefender to Kaspersky, he installs a host of antivirus programs.
He starts them off scanning his computer all at the same time, and it swiftly becomes clear that his laptop is almost a write-off.
There's no option but to leave them running for hours and hours, but astonishingly some of the programs find literally no malware.
The better programs, though, find hundreds of threats, and are able to quarantine and delete many of these - although in classic YouTube style, Basically Homeless promised that this process of software deep-cleaning would be showcased in a later video.