“Offense is the best defense” -Eric Rosen.

A new viral virus has been circulating around Drexel University this week, but instead of flooding the Student Health Center, Drexel’s Information Technology Help Desk has been flooded with people trying to get their devices treated.

Patient Zero has been traced back to cybersecurity major Jeffrey Gauthier ‘28. He was trying to learn how to use Windows Powershell and had created a file named “virus do not open.ps1.”

When asked for a comment, Gauthier replied, “I learn by breaking things. When things stop working, it makes me go figure out how systems interact to make everything run.”

The virus begins with a system prompt to type in the word “tomato.” This prompt prevents all other action on the computer. Once the user types in “tomato,” the virus then changes every user account password, opens Chrome, emails a copy to every contact in Gmail, then runs an infinite loop opening the Notepad program until the computer crashes.

The virus managed to spread initially because Gauthier mistakenly believed that he was on a program known as a virtual machine. Virtual machines are computers inside computers. Actions done inside a virtual machine have no effect on the host computer. When Gauthier ran virus do not open.ps1, his mistaken belief of being on a virtual machine meant that all his friends received a funny-looking email.

Fortunately, Gauthier was nice enough to remove accessibility features. After the computer crashes and shuts down, the user can click the accessibility button on the password screen. Because he loved Powershell so much, Gauthier made it open a Powershell shell. Here, the user can input commands to recover their user account using system privileges. Be careful here! Typing in “tomato” will reactivate the virus.

It appears that Mac and Linux users have been spared from this disaster.

Asked why he did it, Gauthier said, “I’ve used a Mac my whole life. I don’t know how Windows works!”

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