A computer virus is a computer program which can copy itself and infect a computer. and it can scare the hell out of a computer user..:) We try so harder in this digital world to keep our computer healthy than ourselves...yet some geek can write some lines of codes sitting at his home and piss us off...:p There were some legendary viruses which are considered as the most dangerous viruses in the history. Today we are going to know which they are......
Th
is virus struck the world when people had hardly known the existence of
computer viruses. This is the first
MS-DOS virus that hat caused enormous destructions, affecting many countries, universities and companies worldwide.On Friday 13, 1988 it manged to infect no. of institutions in Europe, America and the Middle East.
You may be wondering, why the name 'Jerusalem'.That's because, 1st place to get affected by this virus was Jerusalem University.
- Morris (Internet Worm) - November 1988
This virus infected more than
6000 computers is US including
NASA..!! It also manged to send millions of copies of itself to different network computers, being able to entirely paralyze all network resources.It used the errors in the operating systems to able to spread.It could also pick user passwords.
Believe it or not, the damages it caused were estimated to be $96 million..!!
This virus was w
orse than the last one. Hackers, using this virus, took over more than 500 computers which belonged to army, government and private sector of the United States..! Initially it was believed that the hackers were from Iraq, but later it was found that the hackers were two teenagers from California. The virus 'Solar Sunrise' was named after he popular vulnerabilities in computers that run on the operating system called
Sun Solaris.
The name of the virus 'Mel
issa' comes from a lap dancer from Florida..! Confused..?... She was not the programmer but the programmer,
David L. Smith from New Jersey was got acknowledged with the dancer.
Melisa virus also known as “Mailissa”, “Simpsons”, “Kwyjibo”, or “Kwejeebo”, is a mass-mailing macro virus. World came to know about Melissa,On March 26, 1999, when the virus shut down the
internet mail system..!Melissa was hidden within a file called
"List.DiC", which featured passwords that served as keys to unlocking 80 pornographic websites. The original form of the virus was sent through e-mail to different users.
It didn't end well for the creator of the virus, he was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison and ordered to pay a fine of $5,000.
This virus was similar to
Melissa. It too sent usernames and passwords to users, just like Melissa.It managed to infect millions of computers around the world overnight.The virus started to spread when a user received an email with the subject “ILOVEYOU” and an attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs”. As soon as the file was opened, the virus managed to send its copy to every address present in the Windows Address Book.
Officials tracked the virus and found a young Philippino student was the hacker behind the virus. But he didn't face any charges as Philippines did not have any law that would prevent hacking and spreading malware. This lead to the creation of
European Union's Global Cybercrime Treaty.- The Code Red worm - July 2001
The 21st century viru
s caused damages worth $2 billion.....! Code Red was actually developed to use the power of all computers it infected against the official website of the
White House at a predetermined date. However, White House managed to decode the code Red and stop it from happening.
The Code Red worm was first discovered and researched by eEye Digital Security employees Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh. The worm was named the .ida “Code Red” worm because Code Red Mountain Dew was what they were drinking at the time, and because of the phrase “Hacked by Chinese!” with which the worm defaced websites.
It affected hundreds of thousands of computers worldw
ide shortly after the 9/11 tragedy. Due to its
5 different methods of infecting computers systems and being able to duplicate itself, it is considered as one of the most complicated computer viruses.
Its the most dangerous virus ti
ll now, Downadup Worm . Its also called
"Conficker". It has affected more than 6 millions of computers worldwidein just 3 days...!!.This malicious program was able to spread using a
patched Windows flaw. Downadup was so "successful" in spreading across the Web, because it used a flaw that Microsoft patched in October in order to distantly compromise computers that ran unpatched versions of Microsoft's operating system.But the real power of the virus is, it makes the computer to download the destructive code from random drop point. According to the internet Security Company, F-Secure, the most affected countries are China, Russia and Brazil.
