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The story behind the ILOVEYOU virus that caused $10 billion in damages worldwide

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In the early days of the 21st century, the digital world was shaken by an unprecedented cyberattack that would come to be known as the ILOVEYOU virus. This seemingly innocuous piece of malware, disguised as a love letter, rapidly spread like wildfire across the globe, infecting millions of computers and exposing the fragile state of cybersecurity at the time.

Today, we’re going to take a stroll down memory lane and explore the infamous ILOVEYOU virus that wreaked havoc on computers worldwide in the year 2000.

What’s the ILOVEYOU virus?

The ILOVEYOU virus , also known as the Love Letter virus or Love Bug , was a computer worm that spread through email and file-sharing services on May 5, 2000. It caused an estimated $10 billion worth of damages all over the world, infecting over 50 million computers and causing significant disruption to businesses, governments, and individuals.

Unlike many of today’s sophisticated cyber threats, the ILOVEYOU virus was relatively simple in its design. It was written in Microsoft Visual Basic Script (VBS) and spread through a cleverly disguised email attachment. When the unsuspecting victim opened the attachment, the virus would replicate itself, overwrite files, and send itself to all the contacts in the victim’s address book.

How did the virus spread?

The ILOVEYOU virus was able to spread rapidly due to its clever use of social engineering. The email containing the virus appeared to come from a known contact and had a subject line of “ILOVEYOU.” This played on the recipient’s curiosity and emotions, making them more likely to open the attachment without questioning its legitimacy.

Once the attachment, a file called “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs,” was opened, the virus would execute its malicious code. It would then search for files with specific extensions, such as .jpg, .mp3, and .doc, and overwrite them with copies of themselves. This not only caused data loss but also helped the virus propagate further.

Additionally, the virus would search for the victim’s email address book and send a copy of the infected message to all the contacts within. This allowed the ILOVEYOU virus to spread at an alarming rate, infecting millions of computers within a matter of hours.

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Effects and aftermath of the ILOVEYOU virus

Once the love letter virus’ dust settled, the creators were later identified and arrested . But that didn’t stop the spread of the malware, as it continued to spread around the world.

The ILOVEYOU virus had a wide-ranging impact, affecting both individuals and organizations. Some notable incidents include:

  • The UK Parliament shutting down its email system to prevent the spread of the virus.
  • The Pentagon, CIA, and other US government agencies taking their email systems offline as a precautionary measure.
  • The Ford Motor Company was forced to shut down its email network, affecting thousands of employees.
  • Countless individuals lose personal data, such as photos and documents, due to overwritten files.

In total, it is estimated that the ILOVEYOU virus caused around $10 billion in damages worldwide. The financial impact was felt across various sectors, from the cost of repairing and recovering infected systems to lost productivity.

Love-Letter-For-You-NoypiGeeks

The creators behind the virus

The ILOVEYOU virus was traced to two young Filipino programmers, Reonel Ramones, and Onel de Guzman. They were both students at the AMA Computer College in Manila, Philippines and had created the virus as a thesis project. While their initial intention was not to cause widespread damage, the virus quickly spiraled out of control.

Upon discovering the origin of the virus, Philippine law enforcement raided the apartment of Ramones and de Guzman, confiscating computer equipment and other evidence. However, due to the lack of cybercrime laws in the Philippines at the time, neither of the creators faced any legal consequences for their actions.

This event led to the enactment of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 in the Philippines, which criminalized various forms of computer-related offenses like hacking and the creation and distribution of computer viruses.

Despite the chaos they caused, Ramones and de Guzman never profited from the ILOVEYOU virus. In fact, they have largely faded into obscurity, with de Guzman reportedly working low-paying jobs to make ends meet. On the other hand, not much is known about Ramones.

Lessons learned from the ILOVEYOU virus

The ILOVEYOU virus serves as an important reminder of the potential dangers of cyber threats, even those that may appear relatively simple or harmless. Some key takeaways from the incident include:

  • The importance of cybersecurity awareness : The rapid spread of the ILOVEYOU virus was largely due to social engineering tactics that preyed on human emotions and trust. Educating users about potential threats and how to recognize them is vital in preventing future incidents.
  • Regularly updating and patching software : One reason the ILOVEYOU virus was able to cause so much damage was that it exploited vulnerabilities in widely-used software. Ensuring your software is up-to-date and patched can help protect against known threats.
  • Implementing email security measures : The ILOVEYOU virus primarily spreads through email attachments. Implementing email security measures, such as scanning attachments for malware and blocking suspicious senders, can help prevent similar attacks in the future.
  • Legislation and law enforcement: The ILOVEYOU virus underscored the need for comprehensive cybercrime legislation and international cooperation among law enforcement agencies to combat the growing threat of cyberattacks.
  • Backing up important data : The ILOVEYOU virus caused significant data loss for many victims. Regularly backing up important files can help mitigate the potential impact of a cyber-attack. The extensive data loss caused by the virus emphasized the importance of regular data backups and robust disaster recovery plans.

As response to the ILOVEYOU virus and other high-profile cyber attacks, governments and organizations began investing more heavily in cybersecurity measures. Security technologies and strategies have evolved significantly since the year 2000, including the development of advanced antivirus and anti-malware solutions, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and threat intelligence platforms.

How ILOVEYOU virus helped improve online security

In retrospect, the ILOVEYOU virus can be seen as a catalyst for change in the world of cybersecurity. The widespread damage caused by the virus served as an alarming reminder that even seemingly simple pieces of malware could have devastating consequences. This realization helped pave the way for several critical developments.

Better email security

The ILOVEYOU virus highlighted the vulnerabilities of email systems and the need for better email security. In response, email providers began implementing more robust spam filters and security features, such as scanning attachments for known malware signatures and blocking executable files.

Organizations also started adopting email security best practices, such as implementing strict policies on opening attachments from unknown sources and providing regular training for employees to identify phishing and other email-based threats.

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The rise of cybersecurity companies

The ILOVEYOU virus demonstrated the necessity for specialized cybersecurity solutions, leading to the growth of the cybersecurity industry. Numerous companies were established or expanded their focus on developing advanced security products and services to protect individuals and businesses from online threats.

These companies have played a crucial role in creating innovative technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, to detect and prevent online attacks more effectively.

Increased public awareness

The widespread media coverage of the ILOVEYOU virus raised public awareness about the dangers of cyber threats. As a result, cybersecurity became a mainstream concern, with individuals becoming more cautious about their online activities and taking steps to protect their personal information .

This heightened awareness has also led to a greater demand for cybersecurity education and training programs, both for IT professionals and the general public.

The ILOVEYOU virus was a major turning point in the history of cybersecurity, demonstrating just how quickly and easily a seemingly simple piece of code could cause widespread chaos. It serves as a cautionary tale that highlights the importance of staying vigilant against cyber threats and continually investing in cybersecurity measures.

As we continue to rely more and more on digital technologies, it’s crucial that we learn from incidents like the ILOVEYOU virus and remain proactive in protecting ourselves and our organizations from ever-evolving cyber threats.

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The 20-Year Hunt for the Man Behind the Love Bug Virus

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This story is adapted from Crime Dot Com: From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global , by Geoff White.

It’s 30 degrees in the shade and I’m standing, sweating, at the entrance to a sprawling street market in the Quiapo district of Manila, capital of the Philippines. On a piece of paper I’ve written the name of the person I’m searching for: a Filipino man named Onel de Guzman. I’ve heard he might have worked among the mass of stalls spread out before me ... maybe ... several years ago.

I start showing the piece of paper to people at random. It seems an impossible task. The wildest of goose chases. I don’t know what de Guzman looks like now, because the only photo I have of him is almost 20 years old. Even worse: In the grainy shot, taken at a chaotic press conference, de Guzman is wearing sunglasses and covering his face with a handkerchief.

The young student had good reason to hide. He’d been accused of unleashing the Love Bug , a high-profile and extremely successful virus that had infected an estimated 45 million computers worldwide and caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

The virus was groundbreaking. Not because of its technical complexity or the disruption it caused, but because it showed how to utilize something far more powerful than code. It perfectly exploited a weakness not in computers, but in the humans who use them—a tactic that has been used in countless cybercrimes since. But de Guzman had never admitted to anything. He’d mumbled his way through the press conference, given a couple of noncommittal interviews to the media, and escaped without prosecution. Then he’d gone to ground and hadn’t surfaced in two decades. No social media, no online profile. A ghost in the digital world he’d once been accused of terrorizing.

It had taken me a year to get any kind of lead as to his whereabouts. There were rumors he was in Germany, that he worked for the United Nations in Austria, that he’d moved to the United States, or even that he’d been hired by Microsoft. And now I was stumbling through a market in Manila, showing his name in the hope someone would recognize it.

If I could find him, maybe I could ask him about the virus and whether he understood its impact. And perhaps I could get him to tell me, after 20 years, whether he was really the one behind it. But as I brandished his name, all I got were blank looks and suspicious questions. Then one of the market stallholders grinned at me.

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“The virus guy? Yeah, I know him.”

The Love Bug virus was unleashed on May 4, 2000. It was simple, but devastatingly effective and highly contagious. Once infected, many of the user’s files would be overwritten with copies of the virus, so that whenever the victim tried to open the files, they’d reinfect their system. The virus also tried to steal people’s passwords. But the true genius lay in how it spread. Once infected, the victim’s computer would send an email to everyone in their Microsoft Outlook contacts book. The emails read: “kindly check the attached love letter coming from me,” and attached was a copy of the virus, disguised as a text file with the title “love-letter-for-you.”

Faced with such a tempting message, many people took the bait, opened the attachment, and got infected. It didn’t take long for the virus to spread around the world. When you think about the math, its success becomes easy to understand, and quite frightening: If the initial victim had sent it to 50 people, and then each of them infected another 50 people, and so on, it would only take six jumps for the virus to infect everyone in the world (presuming they all had computers).

Panic ensued: Systems in banks and factories were infected. In the UK, Parliament shut down its email network for several hours to prevent infection. Even the Pentagon was reportedly affected.

Just a few months previously, the world had been fretting about the risk of a so-called Y2K bug—the fear that computers would fail to cope with the switch from dates in the 1900s to the 2000s. The damage predictions had been massively exaggerated, and the vast majority of systems were unaffected. But just as the tech industry breathed a sigh of relief, the Love Bug virus showed the true scale of devastation that could be caused in an increasingly connected world. Estimates of the damage ran into the tens of billions of dollars—much of it spent on fixing infected computers and preventing reinfection. Once it was released, the virus code could be downloaded and tweaked by anyone: within days, researchers were seeing dozens of copycat versions being unleashed.

As the news coverage became ever more shrill, investigators got to work trying to trace the source of the bug. The passwords stolen by the virus were being sent to an email address registered in the Philippines. Local police traced the email account to an apartment in Manila. The net was closing in.

After some initial questioning, they identified one Onel de Guzman, a 23-year-old computer science student at AMA Computer College, studying at the Makati campus, a grim, gray concrete building in the center of the city. The virus had mentioned the phrase grammersoft , which investigators quickly established was an underground hacking cell made up of AMA students, some of whom had started experimenting with viruses. De Guzman was a leading member.

As journalists poured into town, de Guzman’s lawyer hastily arranged a press conference so the world’s media could put their questions to the man increasingly assumed to be at the heart of global virus outbreak. De Guzman appeared, seemingly terrified, hiding behind dark glasses and holding a handkerchief over his face, covering his prominent acne scars. He hung onto his sister, Irene, who lived in the flat that the police had originally raided. Flashguns popped and news cameras zoomed in as de Guzman took his seat. But anyone expecting clarification was soon disappointed. De Guzman’s lawyer fielded many of the questions with vague non-answers.

De Guzman himself seemingly didn’t speak much English. Finally, one of the assembled media managed to ask a key question: Did de Guzman, perhaps, release the virus accidentally?

“It is possible,” mumbled de Guzman.

And that was it. There were no more questions. The press conference ended, and de Guzman’s solitary non-answer was the closest anyone got to an explanation of a virus that infected 45 million machines worldwide.

De Guzman was never prosecuted because, at that time, the Philippines had no law against computer hacking. Soon, the cameras packed up, the news crews left, and the story slipped off the agenda.

With the true author unconfirmed, suspicion fell on de Guzman’s schoolfriend Michael Buen, whose name had appeared on a previous virus, called Mykl-B. Buen denied having anything to do with the Love Bug outbreak, but his pleas were largely ignored. Most online sources still list de Guzman and Buen as the creators of the virus, either jointly or separately, and that’s how it’s been for 20 years. Until now.

The Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene is one of Manila’s most revered Catholic shrines, and in its shadow lies the labyrinthine expanse of Quiapo market, home to everything from Hello Kitty backpacks to LED-lit Virgin Mary statuettes. It was here, acting on a tip-off, that I came to look for Onel de Guzman.

Eventually, the friendly stall-holder who remembered him directed me across town to a different shopping district. I went down another rabbit hole of market stalls, flashing the piece of paper with de Guzman’s name written on it, looking like a tourist dad who’d lost his kids. After many blank looks and suspicious questions, a bored-looking trader pointed me in the direction of a nearby commercial unit. It was empty, but after 10 hours of waiting for him to turn up to work, I finally came face to face with Onel de Guzman.

Now 43, his juvenile acne scars have all but disappeared, and his diamond-shaped face has filled out into comfortable middle age. Still as shy as he was at the press conference all those years ago, he hides his gaze under a mop of jet-black hair, his face occasionally breaking into a smile displaying a distinctive set of uniform teeth. He’d changed so much, I began to doubt I was actually speaking to the real de Guzman, so I started making a furtive sketch in my notepad of the position of the moles on his face, to compare later on with the photo of him from 20 years ago. Back then, in the chaotic press conference, he’d swerved the question of whether he had written the virus, giving the half-answer that’s remained hanging in the air ever since. According to de Guzman, it wasn’t his idea to be so evasive.

“That’s what my lawyer told me to do,” he says, in halting English.

I’d expected to have to extract the truth from de Guzman by forensic interview, and I’d lined up my evidence like an amateur barrister. Remarkably, he wasted no time in confessing to a wrongdoing he’d ducked ever since the turn of the millennium. “It wasn’t a virus, it was a Trojan,” he says, correcting my terminology to point out that his malicious software worked by sneaking onto a victim’s computer disguised as something benign. “I didn’t expect it would get to the US and Europe. I was surprised.”

The story he went on to tell is strikingly straightforward. De Guzman was poor, and internet access was expensive. He felt that getting online was almost akin to a human right (a view that was ahead of its time). Getting access required a password, so his solution was to steal the passwords from those who’d paid for them. Not that de Guzman regarded this as stealing: He argued that the password holder would get no less access as a result of having their password unknowingly “shared.” (Of course, his logic conveniently ignored the fact that the internet access provider would have to serve two people for the price of one.)

De Guzman came up with a solution: a password-stealing program. In hindsight, perhaps his guilt should have been obvious, because this was almost exactly the scheme he’d mapped out in a thesis proposal that had been rejected by his college the previous year.

At the time, he says, designing such software wasn’t difficult. “There was a bug in Windows 95,” he says. “If someone clicks the attachment, [the program] will run through their machine.”

But there’s the rub: how to get people to click on the attachment? De Guzman says he would hang out in internet chat rooms where Manila internet users gathered, and strike up conversations. He would then send his victims an infected file, pretending it was his picture. It worked. “I chatted only to people that had no knowledge of computers, to experiment on them,” he says.

De Guzman had good reason to confine his hacking to Manila residents. At this time, internet access relied on dialup. Since Manila’s dialup passwords would only work on Filipino phones, and de Guzman was stealing passwords to use on his home phone line, he had no need to target victims outside the city. If he’d kept it that way, his life might have been very different. But, like many hackers, de Guzman was curious, and wanted to push his virus forward.

In May 2000, he tweaked his original code so that it would not simply be restricted to Manila residents. He also made two other changes that would ensure his place in hacker history. First, he programmed the virus so that once it had infected a computer, it would send a copy of itself to each person in the victim’s email address book. By doing so, he created a so-called worm virus, a self-spreading monster with no off switch. Once released, de Guzman would have no control.

His second change was the work of true, if perhaps unconscious, genius. Once the virus spread beyond de Guzman’s hands, he needed a way of tempting recipients into opening the attachment that contained the code. His old trick of pretending it was a photo wouldn’t work, so he came up with a new tactic: He gave the virus a title that had universal and near-irresistible appeal. “I figured out that many people want a boyfriend, they want each other, they want love, so I called it that,” he says.

The Love Bug was born.

Like many hackers, de Guzman is a night owl. He finds the dark hours quieter, making it easier to concentrate. It was 1 am when de Guzman found his patient zero, the person whose initial infection would go on to spread the virus. He was chatting online to a fellow Filipino who was living in Singapore. De Guzman can’t remember who the man was, but he remembers sending him a copy of his new, improved virus.

Unaware of the worldwide chaos he’d just unleashed, de Guzman says he then went out and got drunk with a friend. Within a day, though, his virus had spread like wildfire and investigators were closing in on their suspect.

His mother contacted him. She’d received word the police were hunting a hacker in Manila, and she knew of her son’s illicit hobby. She hid his computer but crucially left the disks, one of which had the Mykl-B virus on it, pulling Michael Buen and several dozen other AMA students onto the police’s radar.

For 20 years, de Guzman’s silence left a cloud hanging over his classmate Buen, who is commonly listed as the joint author of the virus. Yet according to de Guzman, he had nothing to do with it. The pair had written viruses before, he says, but the Love Bug was written by de Guzman alone.

De Guzman says he had to take a year off after the incident to let the heat die down, during which he didn’t touch a computer. He never went back to AMA and never graduated. He later became a mobile-phone technician. He says he regrets writing the virus, but he now faces the fate of all wrongdoers in the internet age: infamy that will never decay. “Sometimes I get my picture on the internet,” he says. “My friends said, ‘It’s you, it’s you!’ They find my name. I’m a shy person, I don’t want this.” His children are ages 7 and 14. He knows one day soon they will find out about his role in one of the world’s most infamous viruses. He’s not sure how he’ll deal with that.

At the end of our interview, de Guzman goes back to his job, disappearing into the mall’s mass of tiny tech repair stalls, where he sits surrounded by soldering irons, multimeters, and disassembled mobile phones. He says he loves his work and that he’s content, but as I make my way out of the Blade Runner -esque fluorescent-lit maze of cramped computer shops, I get the feeling this isn’t where he’d imagined his life would end up.

The Love Bug wasn’t the smartest computer virus, nor the most disruptive, and it certainly wasn’t the most profitable. But it’s the perfect illustration of a basic truth about much of the computer crime currently plaguing society today: It’s not about the tech, it’s about the people. Twenty years later, many of the biggest hacks and manipulations carried out on the internet—the digital burglary of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the hi-tech heist of $81 million from Bangladesh Bank, the interference in the 2016 US presidential election—aren’t, at their heart, about code, software, or hardware. They’re about exploiting human frailty. The hacker’s first step is to fool people into doing things they shouldn’t. The real trick is how to convince their victims to perform such actions, and that relies on psychological acumen every bit as much as technical skill. A good hacker needs an instinctive grasp of human behavior, and a deep understanding of our desires and fears.

De Guzman was absolutely not the first person to realize this, but in naming his virus he had, almost inadvertently, come up with the greatest lure of all time. His attack succeeded and became a global menace because he hit upon the one thing sought by everyone on the planet: love.

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Edited extract from Crime Dot Com: From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global by Geoff White, published 12 September 2020. Reproduced by permission of Reaktion Books.

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Home | Threats & Vulnerabilities | Throwback Attack: ILOVEYOU, a Love Letter No One Wanted

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Throwback Attack: ILOVEYOU, a Love Letter No One Wanted

Christina miller.

  • September 16, 2021

Most people would be happy to open their computer to see a love letter; however, starting on May 4, 2000, the terms “love letter” and “Love Bug” took on a whole new meaning. Windows users began receiving emails titled ILOVEYOU that came with a malicious attachment. Within 10 days, this worm had infected more than 50 million people. According to a Forbes article written by Davey Winder , it was estimated that as many as 10% of all internet-connected computers in the world were affected by the ILOVEYOU virus.

The beginning of ILOVEYOU

This unfortunate love story started in the Philippines and was delivered with the subject line ILOVEYOU along with instructions to read the attached email. The virus was tracked to an email address registered to an apartment in Manila, which led to Onel de Guzman. He created the Love Bug virus, not thinking it would reach as many people as it did. In 2000, Guzman, 24, was a computer science student at the AMA Computer College. Within 24 hours of releasing the virus, it had spread across the world.

The ILOVEYOU virus was one of the first eye-openers as to how damaging spam emails could be. Until that point, spam was an annoyance, not destructive, which makes sense because this was one of the first major computer virus outbreaks. In 1988, the Morris Worm was the first worm attack, but that attack’s goal was to create panic on the internet. The goal of the Love Bug was to steal passwords and disrupt information.

The ILOVEYOU Worm Effect

Due to the way this virus multiplies and spreads, it is categorized as a worm. It self-replicates, which means that it can send copies of itself through a network without any action from an actual person. Having a virus of this nature was a new concept. Once a user opened the email, the virus executed a visual basic script, which was hidden by the default view on Windows. The title of the email that people actually saw ended in .txt instead of the true ending of .vbs, which is an essential trick that allowed the virus to take off. Without seeing the .vbs ending, people were more likely to open it thinking it was from a loved one.

The worm would then steal passwords and overwrite files, including both documents and photos stored on any device connected to the original affected computer. Meanwhile, it would also go into the Microsoft Outlook Windows contact list and send a copy of itself to that entire list, starting the cycle over again.

Economic impact

The efforts to recover data from affected systems and remove the infection cost as much as $10 billion, according to Winder. Government agencies, such as the Pentagon, CIA and the U.K. Parliament, were also affected and, as a consequence, all shut down their email. Information technology (IT) systems around the world were shut down from overload, due to computer systems not being made to process this type of virus, or turned off in an effort to prevent spread of the infection.

This virus was especially effective because no one took the threat seriously. If they had, it could have reduced the impact significantly. At that time, most people weren’t acquainted with malware and didn’t understand the lasting effects it could have. There was a previous mass-mailing macro virus, the Melissa bug, that used similar strategies, but the Love Bug surpassed this outbreak fiftyfold. The Melissa virus wasn’t classified as a worm but did target Microsoft Word- and Outlook-based systems. It affected close to a million machines.

Cybersecurity impact

The Love Bug had a highly publicized introduction to the world. As one of the first examples of malware, it changed the way people viewed and used both email and the internet. The deception of the email being from a loved one paired with it sending itself to people’s personal contact lists, hardened people. They now knew to be more apprehensive and less trusting of emails.

Guzman, the creator of ILOVEYOU, was never prosecuted because there weren’t any laws against hacking at that time in the Philippines. Geoff White, a reporter at BBC News, was able to track down and interview Guzman in 2020. In the article , Guzman said he regrets the damage he caused and revealed that he made Love Bug to steal passwords so he could have access to the internet without having to pay. After this fiasco, he never went back to college. He now works at a booth in a mall, repairing phones.

More than two decades later, people are more informed, but malware is always evolving, and there are constantly new ways these types of attacks affect systems.

Do you have experience and expertise with the topics mentioned in this article? You should consider contributing content to our CFE Media editorial team and getting the recognition you and your company deserve. Click here to start this process.

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The 20-Year Hunt for the Man Behind the Love Bug Virus

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COMMENTS

  1. 'I love you': How a badly-coded computer virus caused billions in

    The love bug and its variants would cause some $10 billion of damage, the FBI later estimated, before updates to anti-virus software and email clients reined them in. To this day, ILOVEYOU remains ...

  2. ILOVEYOU

    ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as the Love Bug or Loveletter, was a computer worm that infected over ten million Windows personal computers on and after 5 May 2000. It started spreading as an email message with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and the attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs". [1] At the time, Windows computers often hid the latter file extension ("VBS", a type of interpreted file ...

  3. The story behind the ILOVEYOU virus that caused $10 ...

    The ILOVEYOU virus, also known as the Love Letter virus or Love Bug, was a computer worm that spread through email and file-sharing services on May 5, 2000. It caused an estimated $10 billion worth of damages all over the world, infecting over 50 million computers and causing significant disruption to businesses, governments, and individuals.

  4. The 20-Year Hunt for the Man Behind the Love Bug Virus

    The Love Bug virus was unleashed on May 4, 2000. It was simple, but devastatingly effective and highly contagious. Once infected, many of the user's files would be overwritten with copies of the ...

  5. Throwback Attack: ILOVEYOU, a Love Letter No One Wanted

    The virus was tracked to an email address registered to an apartment in Manila, which led to Onel de Guzman. He created the Love Bug virus, not thinking it would reach as many people as it did. In 2000, Guzman, 24, was a computer science student at the AMA Computer College. Within 24 hours of releasing the virus, it had spread across the world.

  6. Lessons from the First Computer Pandemic: Love Bug

    Lessons from the First Computer Pandemic: Love Bug. Twenty years ago, the world's first computer pandemic called the "Love Bug", also known as "ILOVEYOU" virus, wreaked havoc worldwide. On May 4, 2000, in just a span of 24 hours, the Love Bug affected an estimated 45 million computers worldwide, causing an estimated US$10 billion in damages.

  7. How the ILOVEYOU worm exposed human beings as the Achilles Heel of

    On May 5, 2000, the ILOVEYOU worm, also known as the Love Bug or Love Letter For You, infected more than 10 million Windows personal computers within days. Major enterprises such as 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 shut ...

  8. Love Bug's creator tracked down to repair shop in Manila

    However, in spring 2000 he tweaked the code, adding an auto-spreading feature that would send copies of the virus to victims' Outlook contacts, using a flaw in Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system.

  9. This 20-Year-Old Virus Infected 50 Million Windows Computers ...

    The world's first computer virus pandemic is 20 years old today. AFP via Getty Images. On May 4, 2000, users of Windows computers began receiving an email with a malicious attachment.

  10. The 20-Year Hunt for the Man Behind the Love Bug Virus

    Onel de Guzman had been accused of unleashing the Love Bug, a high-profile and extremely successful virus that had infected an estimated 45 million computers worldwide and caused billions of dollars' worth of damage. The virus was groundbreaking. Not because of its technical complexity or the disruption it caused, but because it showed how to utilize something far more powerful than code. It ...