10 years since the flash of sudden love

    Exactly 10 years ago, almost a day, the world learned about how dangerous and invisible computer viruses can be. The unforgettable " I Love You " infected 55 million PCs in record time, and the estimated damage amounted to billions in any currency.

    A year after Melissa Virus blamed the innocence of the World Wide Web, a student in the Philippines had the idea to write a simple Visual Basic script that would send itself to the entire Outlook address book. The virus quickly spread throughout Europe and Asia, by the morning of May 5, "capturing" the entire planet. But, perhaps, we all understand that this is not a virtuoso coding that made the whole undertaking so successful. A student from Manila, without realizing it, extremely successfully applied social engineering.

    The letter, which was the carrier of the infection, was quite simple. The application was called LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs, and the subject of the letter: "I Love You." Before the average user managed to understand who confessed his love to him, the script was already doing its job. Naturally, not everyone opened the application, but 3 million windows users could not refrain from reading the "letter of love." These people served as the carriers of the first “mail" virus in the network.

    Which, unlike Melissa, exclusively propagated, did a lot of unpleasant things on the victim's computer. Firstly, he immediately smashed photos and music files, tried to download and install a trojan that intercepted passwords and sent them to the Philippines. You could even say that it is this trait that makes "I Love You" the direct ancestor of modern botnets, which are larger and more complex.

    Police tracked down a 23-year-old student, Onel de Guzmán, quickly enough. However, what did not happen quickly was the process of adjusting the Criminal Code of the Philippines for this case, since there was not a single law that said that the creator of the viruses was shining. Since then, we have all taken a very responsible approach to viewing applications in email. Joke.

    source: Wired

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