Where do I even begin with this one? I found a very dangerous place on the internet in which viruses roam completely free. They can disguise themselves as anything, really, and they’ve all been popping up as a result of companies making them from popular media for business. This particular case was odd to say the least. Basically, I had been told by one of my friends who also looks into things like this to search for this particular website that supposedly ports shows and movies for download illegally. Intrigued, I tested it out by using my favorite show, South Park as an example. What popped up was a singular download for only the first season of the show. When I clicked on it, it brought me to a bright, oversaturated purple background with a title and creator name in what seems to be Japanese, with the options ‘play episode 1 now’ and ‘terminate’ available. What I immediately noticed was the fact that in the corner, there was a very unsettling looking character that appeared to be intentionally made to appear as Cartman, except he had no facial features besides 2 small dots for eyes and a very slim, small, vertical mouth. His skin was pale, his pants were pitch black, and he had no details on his jacket, and he had a speech bubble above him, saying “real fun ++”. I decided to play episode 1 to see if everything else was normal, and the episode ran fairly normal, although low-quality, up until the part where cartman first explains what happened to him. Cartman then appeared a bit darker saturated for the rest of the episode. Occasionally, a flashing image of one of the characters with nonsense messages promoting something else with very loud audio would show up for a split second before it cut back to normal. These seemed random up until they started to feature that same deformed cartman as before. He started flashing on the screen with text saying “I know you can see me.” Accompanying him. A while later, the episode was just completely off, cartman was completely gone from the episode, Kenny never died, just vanished in place of where he normally would have been, and the messages appeared more frequently up until the episode ended. After this, it cut to black, and a screen containing the deformed cartman as well as a few other characters that appeared to resemble Stan, Kenny and Wendy on the screen. It now demanded large amounts of money in return for the safety of my computer, which I then paid just in time. After this, my computer force restarted, and it all seemed normal. I ran a virus scan immediately after and found nothing, assuming that the virus had removed itself after the restart. I did notice one peculiar thing, though, that a random tab in my history now says “nobody will ever believe you.” Upon clicking on this tab, it simply leads to an empty page. I think this whole thing was an attempt to use fear-mongering tactics against video pirates in some sick, twisted way, but needless to say, this freaked me out. Stay safe out there.
May as well say that this variant of Cartman is named “E-Rick” (pronounced “Ee-Rick”) just so I have something to call him whenever I refer to him.
