I Love You Virus

 

In May of 2000, a young hacker in the Philippines named Onel de Guzman created an email worm that would change the way the world thought about cybersecurity. De Guzman had just dropped out of college after his professors rejected his undergraduate thesis paper, on the possibility of using malware to steal internet passwords from people in the neighborhoods nearby.

The ILOVEYOU virus comes in an email with "ILOVEYOU" in the subject line and contains an attachment that, when opened, results in the message being re-sent to everyone in the recipient's Microsoft Outlook address book. Perhaps more seriously, it results in the loss of every JPEG, MP3 and certain other files on all recipients' hard disks.
Since Microsoft Outlook is widely installed as the default email management application in corporate networks worldwide, the ILOVEYOU virus can spread rapidly within a corporation. In fact, this is exactly what happened on May 4, 2000. In just about 10 days, ILOVEYOU reached an estimated 45 million users and caused about $10 billion in damages.
It spread so quickly that many major enterprises like the Ford Motor Company, AT&T and Microsoft, as well as government organizations like the Pentagon, CIA, U.S. Army, and parliaments in Denmark and the U.K., had to completely shut down their email services as they tried to bring the virus under control and mitigate its damage.
ILOVEYOU is also known as the "love letter virus" and the "love bug worm." Although commonly referred to as a computer virus, ILOVEYOU is actually a worm.
While a virus is malicious code that replicates itself following human intervention, a worm is a type of malware that can replicate itself and spread from system to system without human interaction or intervention. It doesn't even need to attach itself to software. ILOVEYOU works via email, specifically via a malicious email attachment. When the affected user opens the attachment, their action instantly downloads the worm into their system without their knowledge and starts spreading it across the network.
The email consisted of the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and a simple message: "kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me." When a recipient opened their email, the virus sent copies of itself to everyone in their address book. These recipients assumed the email was a genuine declaration of love or a funny joke, opened it out of curiosity and inadvertently helped spread it further.