ILOVEYOU virus (social engineering )

 

Author's work

1-The victims received an email with the title ILOVEYOU with an attachment LOVE-LETTER-FOR_YOU.TXT. What helped the ILOVEYOU virus to spread is the social engineering element. Because of its unique name, many victims were intrested to open the attachment (SciShow, 2016). 

2-Once the virus is opened, the virus sends itself to the first 15 addresses in the victim's address book, which appears as an email from the victim. Therefore, the virus has infected more than 45 hosts in 2 days(The `I Love You' virus and its implications for genodiversity, 2000).

3-Once the virus was run(or, to be more accurate, the worm ), it started to replace the documents, files, photos, and music, etc., with its name. Thus, if the victim does not have a back-up copy of their computer, all of their data is lost. Therefore, the losses of this worm reached billions of dollars (Knight, 2014).

4-The virus was contained within days and the infected computers were filtered (SciShow, 2016).

References:

SciShow, 2016. 5 Of The Worst Computer Viruses Ever. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF8Ka8Jh0BQ> [Accessed 12 November 2020].

JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE, 2000. The `I Love You' virus and its implications for genodiversity. [online] 93, p.398. Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014107680009300802> [Accessed 16 November 2020].

Knight, P., 2014. ILOVEYOU: Viruses, Paranoia, And The Environment Of Risk. [online] Wiley Online Library. Available at: <https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.proxy.library.dmu.ac.uk/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2000.tb03518.x> [Accessed 16 November 2020].