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
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.
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