 If you were active in the programmer or hacker community around the millennia, then you might remember hearing a momentary buzz about a particularly odd virus that had affected quite a few computers near the end of the summer in 2001. From late July to early September 2001, there were close to 50,000 computers and networks that were confirmed to have been infected with a particularly odd virus known as ignoded.YLP. Unfortunately, the coverage of this large-scale virus was overshadowed by another, what was believed to be unrelated virus known as the Code Red Computer Worm, which appeared around the same time and infected over 1 million computers and networks across the world. Out of the 50,000 computers infected, about 31,000 of them were in Asian-speaking countries, with the remaining ones being in even North America or Europe. Besides the translation issue, this made it harder to gather information of the virus since it's likely that any inquiry into the program made by any Chinese computer security groups has since been censored by their government or otherwise just lost to time. The reason why it noted.YLP is believed to be more than a normal computer virus is how it was obtained. Around the time and even to a day, most viruses are obtained through spam email downloads. The way it works is identity thieves and scammers would send chain emails with titles such as, message from your secret admiring, or, how to become a millionaire in 30 days. Once the victim opens these emails and clicked on whatever downloaded link was attached, then their computer would become infected with a Trojan horse or some other kind of virus. The difference with ignoded.YLP is that the program wasn't downloaded onto computers from the internet or emails. In fact, in almost every case there were no consistent programs downloaded or websites the people had visited to possibly get the virus. Even more strange, some of the computers infected were at no point even connected to the internet. This was either because of the owner living in a remote area without internet access or because of their personal choice not to use the worldwide web. One man interviewed at the time claimed that he had booted up his newly bought computer for the first time to discover the program already installed. The virus itself really didn't do anything that harmful. It's mainly remembered today just for the fact that it's one of a few viruses that never did anything particularly malicious. Normally it would just change the settings on the computer. For example, it might switch the time zone or the date. It would sometimes rename internet explorer or notepad to a bunch of random characters or swap the default windows color scheme with the high contrast color scheme. No files ever got deleted and no identities were ever stolen. The only time the computer was harmed in any way was if someone tried to delete the virus off of the hard drive. Now at the time most of the programmers and tech experts were concerned in containing the code red worm. Because of that not many people were trying to look into ignoded.YLP. Besides a few amateur hackers on a Yahoo group, the only famous real world computer expert that attempted to crack the virus was Professor Alexander Namath from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Below I put an excerpt from a translated email that Professor Namath wrote to a colleague about the virus to give a better sense of what he found. Professor Namath's email to colleague. I have discovered the most strange of all technological oddities my friend. The program I had mentioned when we met for lunch last that one of my students discovered on his computer has not shown any signs of being mischievous in nature yet its purpose continues to elude me. Any attempt I make at looking at the programs code through the use of third party software causes the computer to forcibly shut down and when I reboot the computer I discover the software I was using have been removed. When I tried to upload the file so it may be viewed from the internet the same event of shutting down occurs. Finally I used a portable flash drive to store and transfer the program. When I uploaded it onto the university computer instead of seeing ignoded.YLP I saw many text documents appearing on my desktop. When I opened them they started pasting their own intangible code at such a rate that my hard drive had filled itself to capacity after a few minutes to which the virus started deleting files. I was then forced to reinstall the operating system. August 10, 2001. Professor Namath's experience was not an isolated one. Many others who delved deep enough into the mystery found their computers acting a similar manner when they attempted to tamper with ignoded.YLP. Though Namath was the only computer expert of any notoriety who was involved in the case, a collaboration of frequent posters on one of the larger Yahoo tech message boards became involved in the program as well. After moderators started deleting any topics inquiring about the virus on most of the larger forums, a select group of a few dozen people started their own board just to talk about this strange program. This group who dubbed themselves the Ministry of Silly Walkers, in reference to the Monty Python sketch, made around two dozen different topics in their own sub-form before one of the main members of the group made his own GeoCities site that they then used to discuss any further progress in their goals of cracking the virus. Even though all the posts of the group's private website are now lost and the site itself is inaccessible, you can still learn a lot about the virus by reading the posts they made on the original Yahoo tech group using some web archive software or the Wayback Machine. Below I put a later segment of one of the forum topics to give you an idea of the kind of information they discovered about the virus. Geek but not weak. Note that the poor grammar is extremely difficult to read, so it took me a few long minutes to attempt to piece everything all together. Okay guys, listen, I found something really cool today. So after Cubs and I82 found out that if you use a flash drive to put the virus on another computer, you get all messed up code. I decided to try it out. Now there is no way to stop the computer from crashing after 10 minutes, but what I did find is that you can stream your desktop onto another computer while it's getting filled up with all those junk documents and you can record what it's typing. So I did that and got a video file to play back on my laptop. So after I slowed it down to 90%, I could see everything being typed by the virus that I couldn't see when I was watching it live since the text scrolls so fast and about six minutes in, unlike the 15,000th page of Notepad, I saw a URL just in between the brackets and random code. So I go to the URL and I see it looks like a PHP bulletin board, but most of the icons like the website title weren't displaying properly and had an error icon. So the forum only had no members and only one topic under general discussion called the Amir of the Anti-Radies. I think that has zero views. So I click on the page and get this weird poem. It's obvious whoever made this needs to cut down on his LSD. Lol, here's the link if anyone wants to check it out. CubsFanguy82. Good job finding this out. I never even thought of streaming the computer from another one. Anyone else who has the virus want to try this and see if they get any more links? 999 Dark Elf Mage 999. Lol, that website is really freaky man. Anyone know what that poem means? Mr. Spock. Is the website still working for everyone? Cause I'm getting a 404 page. Lazy is my middle name. Hey, I'm clicking on the link but I'm not seeing a bulletin board. Who are you people? Looks like the link's dead now, but the delinquent rebel sent me a PM with what it said. I'll paste it. In Mist or Cloud, on Mast or Shroud, it perched for Vespers 9. Wiles all the night, through fog smoke white, glimmered the white moonshine. God save thee, ancient mariner. From the themes that plague thee thus. Wilewix thou so, with my crossbow. I shot thee albatross. Even though this oddity of a virus did become infamous with a small group of hackers at the time, the majority of people who became infected by it had no knowledge of the virus's strange agenda. One of the earliest entries we have on the Internet of Ignorant.wilep being mentioned isn't from a computer security or programmer group, it's found in a blog post from the website of a more moderate chapter of the Pacific Northwest based ecoterrorist group known as the Earth Liberation Front. Below is another post on the matter. Environmental Update Report I want to thank everyone for the great support they've shown to each other in these hard times. Every day, more and more innocent animals are slaughtered and more of our precious trees are murdered by the money-obsessed loggers who are killing our Mother Earth. Despite the rain, our protest at City Hall is going to go on as scheduled. We think everyone should bring an umbrella. On a side note, I apologize for any inconvenience to anyone who wanted to know when we would be getting more t-shirts. I still haven't been able to get into my email since my computer's at the tech shop. The people there say the problem's more serious than they thought. I will continue to pray that they can find a way to remove Ignorant.wilep. Michel Whitley, July 30th, 2001 Tech Support Anonymous Forums Serenity Hey, anyone here heard of Ignorant.wilep? Some friends of mine on the Linux forum were trying to crack it. A few weeks back after one guy found it on his Mac, the admin was a real dick and locked the topic. So anyone here know anything about it? Taco Man 11 Who Runs Linux From Their Mac? Wallflower Actually, yeah. Haha, I posted about that over on general discussion, but no one replied to my topic. I work at like the only computer repair shop in Fresno, so old people bring in their computers every day with problems like they forgot how to log into their email or other BS. But around a week ago, this one black guy who was about 50 came in with a brand new top model computer and just told me to call him when we fixed it. He couldn't even tell me what was wrong with it. I don't want to sound racist, but I don't think he bought it if you know what I mean. When I looked at it, the computer looked completely normal. I ran the virus check, found nothing. All the programs on it were just default Windows Ones, except a YLP file called Ignota. I couldn't delete it, and when I finally found a way to move it to another computer, the desktop just got filled up with completely random code. I managed to extract some weird MP4 video file before the hard drive overloaded. The video acted like it was showing a live stream even when it wasn't connected to dial up. It never buffered, and I couldn't rewind it. It was just a camera facing this piece of printer paper with a weird symbol written on it. At that point, I called the guy and told him I couldn't fix the computer. Because of the virus seeming to target Asian speaking networks and computers, obviously the virus has gained more fame in those countries. Even up until 2003, it was pretty regularly talked about among computer science students at some of their larger universities in those countries. And one Korean tech firm to this day offers five million won, the equivalent of around four thousand US dollars, in exchange for information leading the discovery of the identity of the person or group who created the virus. As far as I'm aware, the only official investigation on this program was opened in China after the Minister of Agriculture discovered the virus on his office computer and somehow came to the conclusion that the program was proof of some kind of attempt at espionage. Most of the Asian news articles reporting on the event don't add much to the story, but they are some of the only actual newspapers that have ever mentioned Acknowled.YLP by name. Though I did discover an unpublished article about the apparent hacking written by a journalist who works with the South China Morning Post, which I have posted below. Investigators in the attempted intelligence theft at the office of the Ministry of Agriculture still have yet to discover the identity of the hacker responsible for the crime. It is clear that Minister Chen Yao-bang will not yet make a public statement on the progress made by the investigators, but sources within the government who wish to remain anonymous have reported to the press that they are close to making a breakthrough and have widened their search after it was discovered computers both in the academic and private sector also have been found to have a similar virus infecting their systems, which make the user envious of the dead. Makes the user envious of the dead. It's not a translation error. Even in Mandarin, the wording is odd and I'm not sure what the post meant by that. But since the report never ended up being published, it might just be what happens when a newspaper's editor doesn't go over something to make sure it's ready for publication. Even though the website that those individuals from the Yahoo! text forum created to discuss the virus cannot be accessed anymore through certain linkage techniques, we have been able to see how many times the input was added to the forum from the different IPs. In layman's terms, you can see whenever someone posted, but just not the actual content of the post. On average, the 26 people from the Yahoo! group who posted on the new website made about 12 posts a day. That wasn't y'all September 9th when the numbers skyrocketed. To show what I mean, the user cops fangai 82 posted 10 times on September 8th. On September 9th, cops fangai 82 posted on the website 872 times between the hours of 5am to 11pm. It isn't known what the members of the site discovers, which caused them to talk back and forth so much on September 9th. Partly because all of the website's members became inactive on every site, it was discovered they had accounts on. One thing that is known though is the day after the strange posting history by the Ministry of Silly Walkers. At 1am UTC time on the early morning of September 10th, 2001, the virus disappeared. There was no warning, no inclination of anything happening. It just disappeared from the desktop of every computer across the world. It didn't uninstall or delete itself, it just went away without any trace that it was ever there. Computers that wouldn't start up or whose hard drives were full due to the user's attempting to delete the virus started working perfectly again. Documents that were renamed and color schemes that were changed reverted back to their original form. It was like it never existed. There likely would have been more inquiries or investigations into what had happened, if not for the tragedy which occurred the next day, but for the most part, the virus was forgotten by the public after it had disappeared. The story was believed to have ended there, but recently an interest was taken by the James Randy Educational Foundation into the nature of the virus, and a few people were found who agreed to be interviewed about it. The interviewers asked a series of questions from a script. It was during one of these interviews in which a man who owned a computer store in Dublin, and whom at the time had fallen victim to the virus was asked if he had experienced anything supernatural in his life either before or after the virus. The Irishman told the interviewer how around July 2003, he noticed a strange symbol carved into a bookshelf in his home out of the blue that he had never seen before. He told the interviewer how he noticed the symbol again next year in July, spray-painted on a brick wall in his neighborhood. Then again the year after that, the symbol appeared overnight as a crack on his windshield. Most people wouldn't remember these things over a decade down the line of assume them to be coincidences, but this memory seemed very vivid in the Irishman's mind. Even at the time, something about that symbol was so upsetting that it caused him a large amount of emotional trauma then which still seemed to resonate for over a decade and caused him to become visibly shaken when recounting it. Just something about it made him know it wasn't right when he saw it on his bookshelf. He kept telling the interviewer that when pressed for details, after pulling a larger number of people, it seemed many of the victims of the virus had found this symbol around their homes in one way or another every year in the month of July. During an interview with Professor Alexander Namath Swidow, she told investigators that before his death in 2005, Professor Namath showed his wife a very old leather-bound book that had the symbol in it among a variety of other things. Though Namath Swidow forgets the exact circumstances that her husband was showing her the book, she said that her husband didn't connect the symbol with Ignota.YLP at all and said how he lost interest in within a month of him writing the email that I posted above with Ignota.YLP. That's really all the information that there really is on Ignota.YLP. There are no answers, no theories, nothing that would explain anything. The only record that it ever existed is found in the written accounts of people who experienced it. I don't know if anyone here might know anything we don't so far, but the reason I posted this was because I hope someone might see it and message me on this site with another piece of the puzzle, another tidbit of information not chronicled so far. If on the slight chance you do, I ask you contact me on this website with any information that would be of use.