There are thousands of viruses and worms found in PC all the time, and today we picked the 12 most dangerous viruses/worms that have the most impact to the poor Windows users, including myself. Ok, here it is, their order is not important.

1. ILOVEYOU

The ILOVEYOU worm (a.k.a. VBS/Loveletter and Love Bug worm), a computer worm written in VBScript, is considered by many as the most damaging worm ever. It started in the Philippines on May 4, 2000, and spread across the world in one day (traveling from Hong-Kong to Europe to the United States), infecting 10 percent of all computers connected to the Internet and causing about $5.5 billion in damage. Most of the “damage” was the labor of getting rid of the virus. The worm arrived in e-mail boxes with the simple subject of “ILOVEYOU” and an attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs”. The Pentagon, CIA, and the British Parliament had to shut down their e-mail systems to get rid of the worm, as did most large corporations. The worm overwrote important files, as well as music, multimedia and more, with a copy of itself. It also sent the worm to everyone on a user’s contact list. Only victims with Windows will be affected.

2. Mydoom

Mydoom, also known as W32.MyDoom@mm, Novarg, Mimail.R and Shimgapi, is a computer virus affecting Microsoft Windows. It was first sighted on January 26, 2004 and became the fastest-spreading e-mail worm ever, exceeding previous records set by the Sobig worm.

Mydoom appears to have been commissioned by e-mail spammers so as to send junk e-mail through infected computers. Early on, several security firms published their belief that the worm originated from a professional underground programmer in Russia. The actual author of the worm is unknown… Scary.

3. Blaster

The Blaster Worm (also known as Lovsan or Lovesan) was a computer worm that spread on computers running the Microsoft operating systems, Windows XP and Windows 2000. The worm was first noticed and started spreading on August 11, 2003. The rate that it spread increased until the number of infections peaked on August 13, 2003. Filtering by ISPs and widespread publicity about the worm curbed the spread of Blaster.

You will understand the following if you are tech savvy. The worm was programmed to start a SYN flood on August 15, 2003 against port 80 of windowsupdate.com, thereby creating a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against the site. The damage to Microsoft was minimal as the site targeted was windowsupdate.com instead of windowsupdate.microsoft.com to which it was redirected.

If the worm detects a connection to the Internet (regardless of dial-up or broadband), this can even lead to the system becoming so unstable that it displays the following message and then restarts (usually after 60 seconds).

The worm contains two messages hidden in strings.

“I just want to say LOVE YOU SAN!!”

“billy gates why do you make this possible ? Stop making money
and fix your software!!”

4. Sobig Worm

The Sobig Worm was a computer worm that infected millions of Internet-connected, Microsoft Windows computers in August 2003. It was written using the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler, and subsequently compressed using a data compression program called tElock. There are plenty of variants of the Sobig worm, but the most destructive and widespread of all is called Sobig.F.

Sobig is a computer worm in the sense that it replicates by itself, but also a Trojan horse in that it masquerades as something other than malware. The Sobig.F worm deactivated itself on September 10, 2003. On November 5 the same year, Microsoft announced that they will pay $250,000 for information leading to the arrest of the creator of the Sobig worm. To date, the perpetrator has not been caught.

Viruses and worms are not the biggest threat nowadays. Trojans, spyware and malware are more common to be seen on PCs because these illegal programs have a much more marketing purpose where as viruses and worms are based on hatred and their goal is solely make your computer inaccessible.

I will talk about the next four viruses in Part 2 so please check back!

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