loveletter virus

The ILOVEYOU worm, also known as VBS/Loveletter and Love Bug worm, is a computer worm written in VBScript.

Description

The worm, first discovered in Hong Kong, first arrived in e-mail boxes on May 3, 2000 with the simple subject of "ILOVEYOU" with an attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU. TXT. vbs". The ILOVEYOU virus is an email attachment written in Visual Basic and smartly
disguised as a love letter.

Two aspects of the worm made it effective:

Spread

Its massive spread moved westward as workers arrived at their offices and encountered messages generated by people to the east. Because the virus used mailing lists as its source of targets, the messages often appeared to come from an acquaintance and so might be considered "safe", providing further incentive to open them. A new virus is circulating through e-mail and affecting many customers. All it took was a few users at each site to access the VBS attachment to generate the thousands and thousands of e-mails that would cripple e-mail systems under their weight, not to mention overwrite thousands of files on workstations and accessible servers.

Effects

This particular malware caused widespread e-mail outages, an estimated $10 billion in economic damage, making it the most damaging worm ever in terms of cost to corporations. The worm was responsible for a denial-of-service attack on the official White House website. The worm overwrote important files, as well as music, multimedia and more, with a copy of itself. Read the details of the 'Loveletter' virus. It also sent the worm to everyone on a user's contact list.