1. ILOVEYOU
Perhaps the most virulent computer virus ever created, the ILOVEYOU
virus managed to wreck PCs all across the world. Infecting almost 10% of
the world’s PCs connected to the Internet, the virus caused a total
damage of around $10 billion.
The virus apparently got transmitted via email with a subject line
“ILOVEYOU,” which is a radical human emotion that no one can ignore. To
make it even more alluring, the email contained an attachment that read
something like this: Love-Letter-For-You.TXT.vbs. The moment someone
opened the file, the virus emailed itself to the first 50 contacts
available in the PC’s Windows address book.
2. Melissa
Melissa became the breaking news on March 26, 1999, after hitting the
new age of emailing. Built by David L, Melissa was spread in the form
of an email attachment by the name “list.doc.”
When a person clicked upon the attachment, the virus would find the
Microsoft Outlook address book and email itself to the first 50 contacts
on the list having a message “Here is that document you asked for…donot
show anyone else.” Later on, FBI arrested David L and slapped him with a
fine of $5000 for creating the wildest virus of its time.
3. My Doom
My Doom hit the malware world in 2004 and spread exponentially
through email with random addresses of senders and subject lines.
Infecting somewhere around two million PCs, My Doom smashed the cyber
world by instigating a tremendous denial of service attack. It
transmitted itself via email in a specially deceitful way that a
receiver would first consider a bounced error message that read “Mail
Transaction Failed.”
However, as soon as the receiver clicked upon the message, the
attachment executed and the worm transmitted to email addresses found in
the user’s address book. It is easy to believe that this mass mailer
worm caused a damage of almost $38 billion.
4. Code Red
Taking advantage of the Microsoft Internet Information Server’s flaw,
Code Red spread on the network servers in 2001. Here is an amusing fact
about this dangerous virus—it didn’t need you to open an email
attachment or execute a file; it just required an active Internet
connection with which it ruined the Web page that you opened by
displaying a text “Hacked by Chinese!” It’s no surprise that this virus
devastated nearly $2.6 billion dollars by hitting almost one million
PCs.
And in less than a week’s time, the virus brought down over 400,000 servers that included the White House Web server as well.
5. Sasser
Sasser was a Windows worm that was discovered in 2004. Apparently, it
would slow down and crash the PC, making it even hard to reset without
cutting the power. And its effects were surprisingly troublesome as
well, with millions of PCs being infected and crucial, significant
infrastructure affected.
The worm played on a buffer overflow susceptibility in Local Security
Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) that monitors the safety policy of
local accounts causing crashes to the PC. The devastating effects of the
virus were massive resulting in over a million infections. This
included critical infrastructures, such as new agencies, hospitals,
airlines, and public transportation.
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