I LOVE YOU VIRUS
The ILOVEYOU virus is considered one of the most
virulent computer virus ever created and it’s not hard to see why. The
virus managed to wreck havoc on computer systems all over the world, causing
damages totaling in at an estimate of $10 billion. 10% of the world’s
Internet-connected computers were believed to have been infected. It was so bad
that governments and large corporations took their mailing system offline to
prevent infection.
The virus was created by two Filipino programers, Reonel Ramones and Onel de
Guzman. What it did was use social engineering to get
people to click on the attachment; in this case, a love
confession. The attachment was actually a script that poses as a TXT
file, due to Windows at the time hiding the actual extension of the file. Once
clicked, it will send itself to everyone in the user’s mailing list and proceed
to overwrite files with itself, making the computer unbootable. The two
were never charged, as there were no laws about malware.This led
to the enactment of the E-Commerce Law to address the problem.
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