What Is ILOVEYOU Virus?

The year was 2000. The place, the Internet. Your computer screen was covered in a cascade of heart-shaped boxes containing a simple message "I love you". It was the work of Onel de Guzman, a software developer from Manila, Philippines. De Guzman had written a program that sent itself out to all the email addresses it could find on infected computers, with instructions to send itself to everyone in their address books. The result was an avalanche of emails carrying an attachment that contained the worm's code. What followed was a series of events that would change the world forever. ILOVEYOU spread like wildfire across the globe, infecting more than 60 million computers and causing up to $10 billion in damages—the equivalent of nearly half of today's GDP for some countries—in just two days. In the early 2000s, a computer worm called "ILOVEYOU" spread through email attachments. The ILOVEYOU worm was written in Microsoft Visual Basic Script (VBS) and took advantage of the fact that the Windows scripting engine was enabled by default. ILOVEYOU was responsible for the birth of a large number of variants that carried harmful payloads that could delete data, change files, download other malicious software, and send emails using Microsoft Outlook. The worm was designed to display the message, "I LOVE YOU," on infected computers after it had successfully spread to other computers on the Internet via email. With each new variant of the virus, its payload would also change. ILOVEYOU isn't just important because it helped spawn an entire industry around computer security; it also changed how people thought about computers themselves. It showed us how easy it is for a little piece of code on our hard drives can wreak havoc on our lives—and how hard we'll have to fight back against them if we want peace again!