Week 9 Blog Post
Over the the many years the internet has existed, there have been a lot of examples of “bad behavior,” such as, malware, spyware, trojans, ransomware, worms and other kinds of executable software, created with the purposes of stealing personal information. One of the best examples of bad behavior on the internet is an email worm released on May 4th, 2000, named ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as Love Virus or Love Bug.
The way this virus worked is that you would receive an email with the subject title “I LOVE YOU.” Naturally, this subject would get most people’s attention and most would open the Email to see what it says. The message simply says “kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me” then, after you are done reading the message, there will be a file attached to the email, that is called “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs.” Obviously, the file is not a .txt file, but rather, a .vbs (VBScript) file. If someone were to decide to check out what it was about, and they download the file, if the file is run on their computer, the program would take every other .vbs and .vbe files on the system, and replace them with its own code. But this doesn’t satisfy it. It then continues by finding all files with the extensions .js, .jse, .css, .wsh, .sct, .hta, .jpg, .jpeg, .mp3 and .mp2, deleting all files it finds with those extensions, and replaces all of those files with its code as well, with information. Newer versions of the worm were changed to be much more dangerous, now, not only infecting and overwriting multimedia files, but also replacing files with the extensions .ini and .bat, which are required for the startup of the system, ultimately, preventing the infected system from booting up.
ILOVEYOU originated from the Philippines, so logically, Asia was the first to be infected by it. Despite this, this worm did its job pretty well, spreading to the rest of the world, reportedly, infecting 45 million computers, and shutting down multiple organization emails, all in one day.
Twenty years after the virus was put onto the internet, around April of 2020, Onel de Guzman came out and admitted to releasing the worm. He was arrested for this, however, he was later released.
One thing we can learn from this event is to never click on suspicious-looking files from emails you receive. Always do your research on the files and decide whether or not the file is okay to download onto your computer.
Sources: https://www.quora.com/How-harmful-is-I-LOVE-U-virus-to-organisations
https://www.computertechreviews.com/definition/i-love-you-virus/
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481937/Revealed-The-man-behind-the-first-major-computer-virus-pandemic
(Edit: This blog post was simplified to clear any confusion there was with my instructor assuming it is plagiarized or that my mother had written it for me. I swear on my life that this post was written entirely by me and I honestly should’ve just wrote this with my normal, informal vocabulary from the start, so this confusion wouldn’t even exist. I apologize.)