Learn The Worst Computer Viruses Of All Time
This morning I going through yahoo blogs while having my first cup of coffee. I came across a post that grabbed my attention. The post is written by Christopher Null and he reminded me about some of the worst viruses of all time.
Just wanted to let you know more about security issues so that you can improve your skills in handling computer viruses. Come and join hands with me to see WHO THE HELL caused millions of dollars in damages overnight.
The Worst Viruses of All Time
Brain, 1986
It all started here: Brain was the first “real” virus ever discovered, back in 1986. Brain didn’t really hurt your PC, but it launched the malware industry with a bang and gave bad ideas to over 100,000 virus creators over the next two decades.
Michelangelo, 1991
The worst MS-DOS virus ever, Michelangelo attacked the boot sector of your hard drive and any floppy drive inserted into the computer, which caused it to spread rapidly. After spreading quietly for months, the virus “activated” on March 6, and promptly started destroying data on tens of thousands of computers.
Melissa, 1999
Technically a worm, Melissa (named after a stripper) collapsed entire email systems by causing computers to send mountains of messages to one another. The author of the virus was eventually caught and sentenced to 20 months in prison.
ILOVEYOU, 2000
Noteable for being one of the first viruses to trick users into opening a file, which claimed to be a love letter to the recipient. In reality, the file was a VBS script that sent mountains of junk mail and deleted thousands of files. Terribly devastating, one estimate holds that 10 percent of all computers were affected, to a cost of $5.5 billion. It remains perhaps the worst worm of all time.
Code Red, 2001
An early “blended threat” attack, Code Red targeted web servers instead of user machines, defacing websites and later launched denial of service attacks at a host of IP addresses, including the White House.
Nimda, 2001
Built on Code Red’s attack system of finding multiple avenues into machines (email, websites, network connections, and more), infecting both web servers and user machines. It found paths into computers so effectively that, 22 minutes after it was released, it becamse the Internet’s most widespread virus at the time.
Klez, 2001
An email virus, Klez pioneered spoofing the “From” field in email messages it sent, making it impossible to tell if Bill Gates did or did not really send you that information about getting free money.
Slammer, 2003
Another fast spreader, this worm infected about 75,000 systems in just 10 minutes, slowing the internet to a crawl (much like Code Red) and shutting down thousands of web sites.
MyDoom, 2004
Notable as the fastest-spreading email virus of all time, infecting computers so they can, in turn, send even more junk mail. In a strange twist, MyDoom was also used to attack the sco.com website, a very unpopular company that was suing companies over its code being used in Linux distributions.
Storm, 2007
The worst recent virus, Storm spread via email spam with a fake attachment and ultimately infected up to 10 million computers, causing them to join its zombie botnet.
Other famous viruses:
Added on 9th of April
CIH
CIH, also known as Chernobyl or Spacefiller, is a computer virus written by Chen Ing Hau (陳盈豪 / Chen YingHao) of Taiwan. It is considered to be one of the most harmful widely circulated viruses, overwriting critical information on infected system drives, and more importantly, in some cases corrupting the system BIOS.
MSBLAST.EXE worm aka Blaster.A, LoveSan or Msblast.A
The MSBLAST.A worm infects machines via network connections. It can attack entire networks of computers or one single computer connected to the Internet.
Alvin, there are 2 more virus that affected me before, and also quite famous and dangerous at the time. Try have a look on CIH and MSBlast. CIH caused my friend a motherboard, MSBlast caused me a Harddisk.
Thanks for the information.