HOT NEWS:MOST DANGEROUS MALWARE OF YEAR-2000 RE ATTACK THIS CHRISTHMAS NIGHT IN ALL SERVERS,KERALA

This particular malware caused widespread damage. The worm overwrote important files - music files, multimedia files, and more - with a copy of itself. It also sent the worm to everyone on a user's contact list. Because it was written in Visual Basic Script and interfaced with the Outlook Windows Address Book, this particular worm only affected computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. While any other computer accessing e-mail could receive an "ILOVEYOU" e-mail, only Microsoft Windows systems would be infected.In 2009,


Upper Deck Entertainment commemorated the ILoveYou virus as part of a 20th anniversary retrospective set of trading cards.-SO BEWARE ABT SELECING GREETING SCRAPS
-RAHULRAJENDRAN9995325060

ILOVEYOU was a computer worm that successfully attacked tens of millions of Windows computers in 2000 when it was sent as an attachment to an email message with the text "ILOVEYOU" in the subject line. The worm arrived in e-mail boxes on and after 5 May 2000 with the simple subject of "ILOVEYOU" and an attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs". The final 'vbs' extension was hidden by default, leading unsuspecting users to think it was a mere text file. Upon opening the attachment, the worm sent a copy of itself to everyone in the Windows Address Book and with the user's sender address. It also made a number of malicious changes to the user's system.

Such propagation mechanism had been known (though in IBM mainframe rather than in the MS Windows environment) and used already in the Christmas Tree EXEC of 1987 which brought down a number of the world's mainframes at the time.^{[citation needed]}

Four aspects of the worm made it effective:

• It relied on social engineering to entice users to open the attachment and ensure its continued propagation.
• It relied on a flawed Microsoft algorithm for hiding file extensions. Windows had begun hiding extensions by default; the algorithm parsed file names from right to left, stopping at the first 'period' ('dot'). In this way the exploit could insert the second file extension 'TXT' which to the user appeared to be the real extension; text files were presumed to be innocuous.
• It relied on the scripting engine being enabled. This was actually a system setting; the engine had not been known to have been ever used before this; Microsoft received scathing criticism for leaving such a powerful (and dangerous) tool enabled by default with no one the wiser for its existence.
• It exploited the weakness of the email system design that an attached program could be run easily by simply opening the attachment and gain complete access to the file system and the Registry.

Its massive spread moved westward as workers arrived at their offices and encountered messages generated in the Philippines. Because the worm used mailing lists as its source of targets, the messages often appeared to come from acquaintances and would therefore be considered "safe", providing further incentive to open the attachments. All it took was a few users at each site to access the attachment to generate the millions of messages that crippled POP systems under their weight, not to mention the fact the worm overwrote millions of files on workstations and accessible servers.

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by rahulrajendran