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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

popular viruses



popular viruses



Nowadays, the rapidly changing shape of the world is making way to various
breakthroughs that can either help or destroy the world. In the cyber world,
a different battle is continually being fought against mutations in certain programs
that become a threat to most computer systems.

Trojans, worms and other viruses are present most of the time, at varying degrees
or damage levels. Even if coders or programmers have developed certain counter
programs such as shields and firewalls to safeguard their computers against
cyber attacks and other similar threats, sometimes these are just not enough
to handle all the stress.

Computer viruses still managed to pack in some considerable amount of damage
despite all the futile efforts to stop them. Like biological viruses, the cyber PC
viruses behave in the same way for they cause some negative outcomes that is
detrimental to the overall health of cyberspace. The damages that all these
viruses caused may have reached a cumulative cost of over a hundred billion
dollars. Hence, it is but fitting to enumerate two of the most well known
computer viruses that shook the world by storm.

CIH, Melissa, ILOVEYOU, Code Red, SQL Slammer, Blaster, Sobig.F, Bagle,
MyDoom, and Sasser are among the most popular computer viruses of all time.
But according to the extent of damage that was made, these two are the most
worthy of being mentioned.

Melissa back in 1999 amounted 600 million dollars worth of damage. The spread
of this virus is so great that some giant companies such as Microsoft was forced
to contain the virus infection by switching all systems off and all email capabilities
shut down. It is because the virus made use of the mailing interconnectivity of
the MS Outlook wherein all infected mails will receive a document email attachment
that enables the replication of the virus once it is opened. The problem is it will
email itself to 50 other names in the email directory.

On the contrary, if you want to know about a peculiar virus that gave a whooping
15 billion dollars worth of damages then the ILOVEYOU Virus is the one to talk
about. This Love Bug is actually a visual basic script. Many became infected with this
virus due to the very catchy 'emotional' or 'affectionate' feel to the e-mails
transmitting the said virus. These emails come with the mysterious attachment
of Love-Letter-For-You.TXT.vbs. Like its Melissa predecessor, the virus self
transmits itself to the names found in the Outlook's contact list but this time, the
ILOVEYOU computer virus is transmitting the infection to everyone and not just 50.
To further its damage, it even had the capability to overwrite music, picture files and automatically hunt for user name or passwords that will be sent back to the virus author.

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