According to some estimates, the ILOVEYOU virus caused $10 billion in damages. Citing a lack of evidence, the Filipino authorities dropped the charges against de Guzman, who would neither confirm nor deny his responsibility for the virus. Filipino authorities investigated de Guzman on charges of theft - at the time the Philippines had no computer espionage or sabotage laws. Who created the ILOVEYOU virus? Some think it was Onel de Guzman of the Philippines. Rather than fix bugs, this program was a password-stealing application that e-mailed secret information to the hacker's e-mail address. It downloaded a file called WIN-BUGSFIX.EXE from the Internet and executed it.It sent itself through Internet Relay Chat clients as well as e-mail.It replaced several different kinds of files with copies of itself.It added new files to the victim's registry keys.It copied itself several times and hid the copies in several folders on the victim's hard drive.We're going to take a look at 10 of the worst computer viruses to cripple a computer system. Programs like these can spread much faster than the earliest computer viruses. It might infect computers through e-mail messages or corrupted Web links.
Today when we think of a computer virus, we usually imagine something that transmits itself via the Internet. It wasn't until modems became common that virus transmission became a real problem. A hacker would save the virus to disks and then distribute the disks to other people. In the good old days (i.e., the early 1980s), viruses depended on humans to do the hard work of spreading the virus to other computers. A doctoral student named Fred Cohen was the first to describe self-replicating programs designed to modify computers as viruses. While some pranksters created virus-like programs for large computer systems, it was really the introduction of the personal computer that brought computer viruses to the public's attention. But it took a few decades before programmers known as hackers began to build computer viruses. The computer industry wasn't even a decade old, and already someone had figured out how to throw a monkey wrench into the figurative gears. In fact, in 1949, a scientist named John von Neumann theorized that a self-replicated program was possible. Computer viruses are just one kind of online threat, but they're arguably the best known of the bunch.Ĭomputer viruses have been around for many years. But the concern is understandable - according to Consumer Reports, computer viruses helped contribute to $8.5 billion in consumer losses in 2008.
If you've never had a machine fall victim to a computer virus, you may wonder what the fuss is about. Some can wipe out the information on a hard drive, tie up traffic on a computer network for hours, turn an innocent machine into a zombie and replicate and send themselves to other computers.
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