I got curious — how did people even catch viruses on their computers? Was it something a friend sent? Or maybe they downloaded a cracked game or some shady program? Share your stories — would be interesting to read.
I worked for a small company, not an IT job, this happened like 10 years ago.
The office administrator lady got an email from an unknown address. The email was in Italian, she couldn't speak Italian, but we had an Italian client, so it was not unexpected that we got an email in Italian. The email had an attachment, a docx file. She downloaded it, opened it then Word asked if she wants to allow running macros embedded in the document, and she obviously clicked yes. We had a small Linux file server, and the virus running on her PC encrypted several tenthousand excel files before it was noticed that something is happening and her machine could be switched off.
No problem - said the boss, we only lost a half day of work, as we have an offsite backup, it runs every night, we can just restore yesterday's data. Unfortunately the backup stopped half years ago, but no one checked the logs...