In today’s #WayBackWednesday, we focus on a Loveletter from the past: the ILOVEYOU virus.
Introduced way back in 2000, ILOVEYOU was a “modern” virus which targeted Windows computers. It was initially disguised as an attached love letter in an email. When the victim would try to download the email attachment, a VB Script would run and infect the computer. The original malware was the work of one attacker, and he released it world-wide out of curiosity.
ILOVEYOU had a few interesting, well know patterns found in many modern viruses: it sent love letter emails to other users in the victim’s address book, it remotely loaded and then installed password stealing malware and it overwrote random files. It spread so broadly and so quickly, that several large organizations shut down their email servers until the virus could be contained.
While we can see common virus patterns in the behavior of ILOVEYOU, the business model for ILOVEYOU is vastly different to today’s malware as a service landscape. Learn more about the modern evolution of viruses in Sebastian Gebhard’s informative BSides Munich presentation, “The Current State of Ransomware”. https://youtu.be/J3yv6pmY4GM
Learn more about ILOVEYOU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU
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