ILOVEYOU is the best thing to read sometimes, but not always. ILOVEYOU became a nightmare for the 10 million windows users when the virus ransacked their computers on May 4th, 2000.
The ILOVEYOU virus was circulated as an email titled ILOVEYOU with an attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs”, and this attachment was where the virus was hidden. ‘.vbs’ (which stands for visual basic script) is a windows identifiable file and thus the attachment was saved as a ‘.txt’ file on the user’s computer. And the ‘.txt’ extension led users to think that this was a normal text file. And when a user opened this file, it activated a script which led to massive damages to the computer.
This virus replaced files on the computer, took control of every picture, every song and every file on the owner’s hard disk along with stealing passwords and getting access to the systems. And it multiplied the damages by emailing itself to everyone in the mailing list of the already attacked computer. And this led to large scale damages to work organisations, where it was easy to replicate to the entire working employees of the organisation. It is also reported that Ford Motor Company was one such organisation which had to shut down its operations due to this virus.
Due to the large-scale reproducibility of the virus, it spread in a day from its origination in the Philippines to various parts of Asia, Europe and The United States. The virus led to a loss of over 6 billion US Dollars, and it took another 15 billion to remove the virus and the effects of the virus from the systems.
The investigating teams nabbed two young Filipino programmers to be the masterminds behind the virus, but in 2000 there were no laws in the Philippines that prohibited writing and creating malware. And that led to both men being released without having to face the consequences of their cyber-crime. It did however lead to the Philippines finally having a law against cybercrimes.
The ILOVEYOU virus did create a lot of harm, but given the current circumstances around the world I would gladly trade coronavirus for the ILOVEYOU virus.
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