Member Since: 5/29/2012
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ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as Love Letter, was a computer worm that attacked tens of millions of Windows personal computers on and after 4 May 2000[1] local time in the Philippines when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and the attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs". The latter file extension (in this case, 'VBS' - a type of interpreted file) was most often hidden by default on Windows computers of the time, leading unwitting users to think it was a normal text file (this method is called spoofing).
Opening the attachment activated the Visual Basic script. The worm did damage on the local machine, overwriting random types of files (including Office files, image files, and audio files; however after overwriting MP3 files the virus would hide the file), and sent a copy of itself to all addresses in the Windows Address Book used by Microsoft Outlook.
The malware originated in the Pandacan neighborhood of Manila in the Philippines on May 5, 2000, thereafter following daybreak westward across the world, moving first to Hong Kong, then to Europe, and finally the United States, as employees began their workday that Friday morning.[2] [3] The outbreak was later estimated to have caused US$5.5-8.7 billion in damages worldwide,[4][5] and estimated to cost US$15 billion to remove the worm.[6] Within ten days, over fifty million infections had been reported,[7] and it is estimated that 10% of internet-connected computers in the world had been affected.[5]
Damage cited was mostly the time and effort spent getting rid of the infection and recovering files from backups. To protect themselves, The Pentagon, CIA, the British Parliament and most large corporations decided to completely shut down their mail systems.[8] This virus affected over 45 million computers and was one of the world's most dangerous computer related disasters.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU
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