Love and Other Bugs
CEBU, Philippines - I was typing like crazy and organizing data on my laptop when BAM! I started seeing blue on the computer screen. I was doomed. With my deadline just a couple of hours away and with no back-up data, I was on the verge of tears.
I checked in my laptop to our company's IT Department only to find out that I was right all along: my laptop was bugged. Damn you, virus. Damn you!
Computer viruses are as deadly as they are, I would like to say, tiny. They can shatter your world into a million pieces and they can make all that hard work go down the drain.
Computer viruses are computer programs that have the power to reproduce or copy itself. Very much like a cell that has the power to split and multiply over and over and over again. In the process of recopying itself, the computer virus can and will infect your computer whether you like it or not. Mostly, it is the latter.
Lately, viruses have become an umbrella term for all types of malware, including worms, Trojans, rootkits, adware, spyware, and even those without any ability to reproduce. This can often be misleading because the distinguishing factor of a true virus is its ability to spread when a user sends over the executable code to another target computer through flash disks, networks, or over the internet.
Viruses can hit and wreak havoc to data files, applications, and worst of all, your operating system files. In plain English, operating system files control the computer. Or put it this way, if a virus hits you OS, it's like cancer hitting your brain.
Over the past ten years, the world of computers has been ravaged by one too many viruses. Here are the big ten:
Bagle
Disaster level: major tsunami
Damage: tens of millions of dollars
Bagle was a silent killer. As an email attachment, it fed on Windows files for email addresses to spread itself the cyberworld over. But just when you thought this was already it, you'll be shocked to know that this is only the tip of the cyber ice berg. Bagle opened the backdoor to a TCP port that can be used by anyone and any application to access all kinds of files. TCP or the Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite along with the Internet Protocol (IP-does it ring a bell?). the world wide web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP to delivery a stream of bytes from one program in a computer to another.
CIH Virus
Disaster level: 7.2 magnitude earthquake
Damage: $20-$80 million worldwide, infinite amounts of PC data reduced to ashes
This baby came from Taiwan and eventually did a world tour. The C in CIH definitely doesn't stand for 'Care'. CIH is perhaps one of the most heartless viruses in town, overwriting files on the PC's hard drive until it would no longer work. Not content with that, CIH can also keep your PC from booting up by overwriting is BIOS.
MyDoom
Disaster level: earthquake and tsunami rolled into one. Add a teensy bit of snowstorm, too.
Damage: reduced global internet performance speed by 10% and Web load up times by 50%
The creator of this baby didn't go wrong with the name. When MyDoom spread like wildfire, you can bet your bottom it meant everyone's doom. MyDoom multiplied via email and spread itself more as an email attachment with the message having the subject head "Mail Transaction Failed". Clicking on the attachment meant the click of doom as it spammed the worm to e-mail addies in your address book.
Melissa
Disaster level: Deluge
Damage: $1 Billion
Beware of the fancy Simpsons quotes inserted at the bottom of the host computer's documents. This was exactly how Melissa wreaked an epic disaster in computers way back 1999. Melissa proceeded to adios critical Windows files after inserting the blasted quotes. Melissa went full blast in its destruction path when Windows 97 and 2000 were still the hottest things in town. It used mass email processes and accessed the first 50 entries from a user's MS Outlook 97/98 when the document was opened. The rest is history-as well as the files.
Sasser
Disaster level: Maldives going underwater
Damage: tens of millions of dollars, satellite communications shutting down for certain news agencies, cancellation of several Delta airline flights, shut down of several companies' systems the world over
What happens when there's a security flaw in a non-updated Windows 2000 and Windows XP system? Sasser, that's what. Sasser is quick and nifty. It simply scanned other unprotected systems and go forth to multiply. Simple as that.
ILOVEYOU
Disaster level: Armageddon and Judgment Day
Damage: $5.5 billion to $8.7 billion in damages; ten percent of all Internet-connected computers hit
Carino brutal. That's what this baby is. It shows and spreads love in the most painful of ways, it really is quite a heartbreaker. This baby made it on the cover of Time Magazine and into computer systems world wide. It nabbed contacts from your MS Outlook list and sent emails with the subject line 'I LOVE YOU'. If your one of those hopeless romantics who felt the biting urge to click on it-and did, the virus simply copied itself and kept sending the same message over and over again. Those who didn't know that the message was a bug would open the document and cry their hearts out when their files have been overwritten. Completely.
Sobig
Disaster level: Landslide and sandstorm
Damage: 500,000 computers world wide; $1 billion lost in productivity
Damn these email attachments. Sobig entered computers that way with the file having a .pif or .scr extension that quickly infected the host computer when executed. Sobig activated its own SMTP host and gathered email ads to send more messages to, eventually flooding emails way over the brim.
Code Red
Disaster level: twelve town buried underneath lava from 5 simultaneous volcanic eruptions
Damage: Code Red and Code Red II are two worms with damages estimated at $2 billion; a rate of $200 million in damages per day
Consider this a Valentine gift from some psycho computer genius who launched this virus on the even of Valentines. Code Red took advantage of Microsoft IIS servers' buffer overflow vulnerability to self-replicate. It fed the computer more information than it could handle, eventually causing the poor thing to shut down.
SQL Slammer
Disaster level: Sandstorm
Damage: shut down of South Korea's online capacity for 12 hours; affected 500,000 servers worldwide
Here's the thing. SQL Slammer hit servers and not PCs. Small (at only 376-byte) but terrible, it generated several IP addresses out of nowhere and spread by sending itself to those IP addresses. Slammer infected 7500 servers in a minute (literally). If the IP address that it created ran an nunpatched copy of Microsoft's SQL Server Desktop Engine, that computer eventually sent SQL Slammer to other random IP addresses, making it too much to handle. Slammer caused an overload in the network routers globally creating a domino effect of higher demands on routers and shut downs.
MSBlast
Disaster level: Planetary collision
Damage: $2-$10 billion dollars, hundreds of thousands of infected PCs
The moral of the story was simple. Never announce a vulnerability in the Windows system otherwise some hater might take advantage of it and come up with a worm called MSBlast. MSBlast went a little on the personal level, believe me. It sent a personal message that said something like, "Billy Gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!". The author may just have been a wee bit too emotional, if you ask me. Six months after a trivial File Transfer Protocol server was installed on the computer and downloaded the code into the host computer, nearly 25 million computers were still infected. Talk about having a blast.
Sources:
http://www.catalogs.com/info/travel-vacations/top-10-worst-computer-viruses.html
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