B E W
A R E ! ! ! !
If you receive an email with a subject line with the phrase ILOVEYOU in
it…..DONT OPEN the attachment named Love-Letter-For-You.Txt.vbs. Who would not
be tempted to open it, when it has the word everybody longs to hear and
especially upon reading that a love letter for you. You might be very excited
to open it ! Well, beware! Because it may damage or corrupt your files.
Viruses are the biggest security threat today. They modify the programs
without permission with occassional disastrous results. Viruses are actually
computer programs that are designed to spread themselves from file to another,
on a single computer and eventually do some additional harm.
From among the many viruses that we have today, let me discuss with you
about the very sweet virus called ILOVEYOU VIRUS. It was first reported
Thursday on May 4,2000 afternoon, Hongkong time and early morning in Europe.It
had caused companies and government offices damaged by shutting off mail systems,
servers, banking systems and in some cases caused problems with pagers and /or
paging services.
The author of this ILOVEYOU VIRUS was Rodel Lequip and Onel de Guzman.
They are couple coming from the Philippines. Guzman was a student at AMAComputer
Collegein Makati who dropped at a few months before the virus was released (around
early may,2000)
The love bug infects users who are using microsoft windows
and/ormicrosoft outlook. Victims would received e mail with the heading “ILOVEYOU”.
The menace clogged web servers, overwrote personal files and caused corporate
IT Managers to shut down e-mail system
This virus arrives as e-mail with the subject “ILOVEYOU” and an
attachment named “Love-Letter-For-You.txt.vbs”. Opening the attachment infects
your computer. The infections first scans your PC’s memory for passwords, which
are sent back to virus’s creator( A Website in the phils which has since been
shutdown) The infections then replicates itself to everyone in your Outlook
adress book. Finally the infection corrupts files ending wt,
.vbs,.vbc,.js,.css,.wsh,.sct,.hta,.jpg,.jpeg,.mp2,.mp3 by overwhilming them
with a copy of itself.
You can get this virus in only one way. If you receive it , don’t execute
it. Just delete it IMMEDIATELY, even if the message is from the one you know
well.
The unfortunate fact was that the Philippines didn’t have any anti-
computer hacking laws in place at the time. New legislation was introduced in
June, but could not be applied to the Love bug case(Post facto law).