1 ) Jerusalem – 1987
This is one of the first MS-DOS viruses in history that caused
enormous destructions, affecting many countries, universities and
company worldwide. On Friday 13, 1988 the computer virus managed to
infect a number of institutions in Europe, America and the Middle East.
The name was given to the virus after one of the first places that got
“acquainted” with it – the Jerusalem University.
Along with a number of other computer viruses, including “Cascade”,
“Stoned”, “Vienna” the Jerusalem virus managed to infect thousands of
computers while still remaining unnoticed. Back then the anti-virus
programs were not as advanced as they are today and a lot of users had
little belief of the existence of computer viruses.
2 ) Morris (a.k.a. Internet Worm) – November 1988
The Morris worm or Internet worm was one of the first computer worms
distributed via the Internet. It is considered the first worm and was
certainly the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It
also resulted in the first conviction in the US under the 1986 Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act. Once the worm discovers an internet connection, all
that it must do is download a copy of itself to that location, and
continue running as normal. Now it has been 7 years since the Worm was
defeated, but it is still worth looking at what happened, both in terms
of how the program operated, and as to what conditions allowed it to do
what it did. With that in mind, there are a number of subtopics of
interest.
3 ) Solar Sunrise – 1998
Two Californian teenagers took American government by surprise, in
1998, when they intruded and took control of around 500 systems that
belonged to the governmental as well as private sector. This was done
with the help of a computer virus and the situation was given the name
of Solar Sunrise, after an operating system called Sun Solaris. The
computers that ran this OS had few weaknesses. US government took the
incident as another golden opportunity to blame Iraqis but soon found
out that the culprits were no other than their own Americans.
Initially it was believed that the attacks were planed by the
operatives in Iraq. It was later revealed that the incidents
represented the work of two American teenagers from California. After
the attacks, the Defense Department took drastic actions to prevent
future incidents of this kind.
4 ) Melissa – 1999
The Melissa virus, also known as “Mailissa”, “Simpsons”, “Kwyjibo”,
or “Kwejeebo”, is a mass-mailing macro virus. As it is not a standalone
program, it is not in fact a worm. Melissa can spread on word processors
Microsoft Word 97 and Word 2000 and also Microsoft Excel 97, 2000 and
2003. It can mass-mail itself from e-mail client Microsoft Outlook 97 or
Outlook 98. If a Word document containing the virus, either LIST.DOC
or another infected file, is downloaded and opened, then the macro in
the document runs and attempts to mass mail itself. When the macro
mass-mails, it collects the first 50 entries from the alias list or
address book and sends itself to the e-mail addresses in those entries.
Melissa computer virus was developed by
David L. Smith in
Aberdeen Township, New Jersey. Its name comes from a lap dancer that the
programmer got acknowledged with while in Florida. After being caught,
the creator of the virus was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison
and ordered to pay a fine of $5,000. The arrest represented a
collaboration of FBI, New Jersey State Police and Monmouth Internet.
5 ) I Love You – May 2000
This is one of the most dangerous worms ever and spread worldwide in
only one night. It infected around ten percent of all internet users,
and the monetary loss was around $5.5 billion. The process started when a
user received an email with the subject “ILOVEYOU†and an
attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbsâ€. As soon as the file was
opened, the virus managed to send its copy to every address present in
the Windows Address Book. This worm was written by a Filipino student
who was punished as Philippines had no law related to such cyber crimes.
Perhaps this incident triggered the creation of European Union’s
global Cybercrime Treaty.
6 ) The Code Red worm – July 2001
The Code Red worm was a computer worm observed on the Internet on
July 13, 2001. It attacked computers running Microsoft’s IIS web
server. The Code Red worm was first discovered and researched by eEye
Digital Security employees Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh. The worm was
named the .ida “Code Red” worm because Code Red Mountain Dew was what
they were drinking at the time, and because of the phrase “Hacked by
Chinese!” with which the worm defaced websites.
Although the worm had been released on July 13, the largest group of
infected computers was seen on July 19, 2001. On this day, the number of
infected hosts reached 359,000. The worm spread itself using a common
type of vulnerability known as a buffer overflow. It did this by using a
long string of the repeated character ‘N’ to overflow a buffer,
allowing the worm to execute arbitrary code and infect the machine.
7 ) Nimda – 2001
Nimda is a computer worm, and is also a file infector. It quickly
spread, eclipsing the economic damage caused by past outbreaks such as
Code Red. Multiple propagation vectors allowed Nimda to become the
Internet’s most widespread virus/worm within 22 minutes. The worm
was released on September 18, 2001. Nimda was considered to be one of
the most complicated viruses, having up to 5 different methods of
infecting computers systems and duplicating itself.
8 ) Downadup – 2009
The Downadup worm, also known as Conficker and Kido, has affected 6
million PCs in just the past three days, according to British officials.
his malicious program was able to spread using a patched Windows flaw.
Downadup was successful in spreading across the Web due to the fact that
it used a flaw that Microsoft patched in October in order to distantly
compromise computers that ran unpatched versions of Microsoft’s
operating system. According to New York Times, conficker has more than 7
million computer systems under its control now. China, Argentina,
Brazil, Russia, and India were the main affected nations.
