According to the report of the AV Test institute, every day more than 350,000 malicious programs are detected. WebEx, in turn, estimates that the global losses of companies caused by malware reach USD 55 billion a year. Here are the four most dangerous computer viruses in history.
Place 4. ILOVEYOU
On May 4, 2000, Onel De Guzman, a student from the Philippines, sent an innocent-looking e-mail with the subject line “ILOVEYOU” to all his contacts. It was accompanied by an attachment with a supposed love letter.
There was no letter attached. He was for it code written in VBScript, which, when launched, sent a copy of the message to everyone in the address book. In addition, the virus scanned the computer’s local resources for files with popular extensions and overwrote them with its own copies.
From the Philippines, the virus made its way to Europe and then to the United States, where it overloaded the servers of the largest corporations and government institutions. In just 10 days, nearly 50 million Windows computers fell victim to ILOVEYOU. The cost of repairing the damage caused by ILOVEYOU was estimated at USD 15 billion.
Place 3. Klez
Klez, like most dangerous viruses of the 2000s, spread via email. Is estimated, that in 2001 it infected over 7 percent. computers in the world.
The virus exploited a vulnerability in the Trident engine, which was used by Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express to render HTML messages. What’s worse, it was not detected by popular antivirus programs.
Klez has many variants, with each subsequent one being more dangerous than its predecessor. It is estimated that the global losses caused by the software reached almost 20 billion dollars.
Place 2. Sobig
In 2002-2003, Sobig became the real terror of the Internet. Like Klez, it had a number of variants, with the most dangerous one marked with the letter F. Sobig, which masqueraded as legitimate software, is still considered the second fastest-spreading computer virus in history.
In 2003, Microsoft offered a reward of $250,000. dollars for information that could help find the creator of Sobig. However, he was never caught.
Much less fortunate was the creator of another popular virus, Sasser, which turned out to be 17-year-old German Sven Jaschan. He was sentenced to 21 months of suspended prison.
Place 1. MY.DOOM
It is the most harmful computer virus in history, which at the peak of its popularity was responsible for 25 percent of all malware infections. all sent e-mails. MyDoom not only infected victims’ computers, but also connected them into a giant network called a botnet, which was then used for DDoS attacks on the servers of large corporations.
The first such attack targeted the controversial SCO Group, which claimed rights to parts of the Linux source code. It is therefore possible that MyDoom was created as a kind of revenge for the actions taken by the SCO Group.
MyDoom caused losses of up to $38 billion, and its creator was never caught.
Source: Gazeta
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