The trick still works……..
Hey guys, you also get caught….. on this very day, a virus named ILOVEYOU created havoc in the online world, here is the special report by BBC.

All around the world, security researchers were waking up to the scale of the problem confronting them.

It all started in the Philippines many hours earlier when 24-year-old Onel De Guzman released a virus that he had proposed creating as part of his undergraduate thesis.

Archive: ‘ILOVEYOU’ creator tracked to Philippines

The key part of the virus was not any technical trick but the wording of the subject line – ILOVEYOU – and its attachment LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.

Few could resist opening the attachment which kicked off the attack code that then plundered their e-mail address list and sent itself to every name it found.

In 2000, many people did not have any security software and even those that did only updated the signatures of known viruses once a month.

With defences so scant, pretty much everyone that opened up the attachment was infected. In all about 45 million Windows PCs were thought to have been hit on 4-5 May.

Despite being traced via an alias he left in the virus, Mr De Guzman was never charged with a crime. At the time he released the malware, the Philippines had no laws criminalising malicious use of computers.

Unfortunately, combating the LoveBug was hard.

Big companies were hit the hardest. The virus kicked off a tsunami of e-mail within and between companies so their mail servers crashed under the load.

The anti-virus companies released a fix around 1000GMT but few could get hold of it because so many people were trying to download it at the same time.

The LoveBug did more than just cause a problem in early May, ten years ago.

Prior to its release, viruses were written by teenagers for kicks. Similarly spam senders were few and far between because they had to pay for their bandwidth and hosting.

The LoveBug showed how to get spam to send itself and how, with a cleverly designed virus that preyed on human psychology and technical failings, malware could rack up enormous numbers of victims.

The end result is that now 90% of all e-mail sent is spam. Star Labs, which became MessageLabs soon after, now stops more than one million viruses every day. Cyber crime is big business and is done for financial gain rather than kicks of bragging rights.

mahendra
mk inc.

courtesy – BBC news