Top 5 Most Dangerous Computer Virus in History
The earliest computer viruses were pretty tame for example very earliest virus "Creeper" which just displayed the message " I'M A CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU CAN" were innocuous experiments in computing. Before starting with 7 Most destructive viruses in all time History . I would like to talk about very first Computer Viruses of Mac and Pc's
I think if you are a computer geek you might have some idea about Elk Cloner and Brain. When we talk about 90's, mostly viral viruses are floppy disk based and were carried from computer to computer by human hands.
Do you know how exactly did the first virus spread around the globe? And who invented it ? Well it depends on for which platform we are talking about, it can be Mac or PC . The first Apple virus was a teenager's prank.
Elk cloner : He took two weeks to write this "residue", in assembly language. The program is called as Elk Cloner. It was a boot sector virus, when an uninfected disk was inserted into an infected computer. The computer creates a clone of Elk cloner into Floppy disk which makes. The virus caused subtle errors until 50th time you inserted the disk into a computer. In this virus instead of game starting following poem came on the screen.
" Elk Cloner : The program with a personality
It will get on all your chips Yes, it's Cloner! It will stick to you like glue It will modify RAM too Send in the Cloner!"'
“Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Basit & Amjad (pvt) Ltd. BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAB BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE :430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS.... Contact us for vaccination............ $#@%$@!!”
Image source : Malware wiki
This is all about the very first viruses developed for Mac and PC. Today spreading virus around the globe has become a very easy task. Today getting a computer virus in your PC can be very harmful, it can lead to a complete disaster. Today in this article we have listed 7 most famous and malicious computer viruses that had caused severe damage to real life structure and were very harmful, It accounted billions of dollars to world's economy sector.
1. ILOVEYOU
Image Source : Supinfo
Don't go on the name because ILOVEYOU is considered one of the most virulent computer virus ever created and after reading this paragraph even you will accept this fact with no doubt. Reonel Ramones and Onel de Guzman were two Filipino programmers who created this virus.
The virus managed to wreck havoc on computer systems all over entire globe. It has caused damages totaling estimate of $10 billion. ILOVEYOU infected over 10% of the world's internet connected computers. The impact of this virus forced government to to shutdown mailing system to prevent them from getting infected.
Working :
- It used social engineering to get people to click on the attachment in this case, a love confession.
- The attachment was actually a script that poses as a TXT file, due to Windows at the time hiding the actual extension of the file.
- On clicking it will send itself to everyone in the user’s mailing list and proceed to overwrite files with itself, making the computer unbootable.
Fact : The two were never charged, as there were no laws about malware. This led to the enactment of the E-Commerce Law to address the problem.
2. Melissa :
It was named after an exotic dancer from florida, David L. Smith, He created this virus in 1999. It was posted up on alt.sex Usenet group as an infected Word document. This document claimed to be a list of password for pornographic sites. Many people become so curious in knowing password and they clicked on it and downloaded it on their hard disk. On opening it does following things :
- Virus will mail itself to the top 50 people in the user’s email address book
- This has caused an increase of email traffic.
- It led to Disrupting the email services of governments and corporations.
- Sometimes It also corrupts documents by inserting a Simpsons reference into them.
Smith was caught when they traced the Word document. The file was uploaded from stolen AOL account, this resulted in arrest of David. The virus reportedly caused $80 million in damages.
Fact : He helped FBI in capturing other virus creators, famous among them the creator of the Anna Kournikova virus. His cooperation saved him and he served only 20 months and paid a fine of $5000 of his 10 year sentence.
3. Code Red
image source : f-secure
It was discovered in 2001 by two eEye Digital Security employees.
It is interesting to know this virus was name Code red because at the time of discovery the pair were drinking Code Red Mountain Dew.
Working :
- The worm targeted computers with Microsoft IIS web server installed, exploiting a buffer overflow problem in the system.
- It leaves very little trace on the hard disk as it is able to run entirely on memory, with a size of 3,569 bytes.
- Once infected, it will proceed to make a hundred copies of itself.
- Due to a bug in the programming, it will duplicate even more and ends up eating a lot of the systems resources.
It leaves a message behind on affected web pages, “Hacked By Chinese!”, which has become a meme itself. A patch was later released and it was estimate that it caused $2 billion in lost productivity.
Fact : Total of 1-2 million servers were affected, which is amazing when you consider there were 6 million IIS servers at the time.
4. Sasser
In year 2004 Windows has got its first worm. It was created by a computer Science student Sven Jaschan, who is also known for creating Netsky worm. It was an annoying worm as it slows down and crashes the computer, while making it hard to reset without cutting the power. The effect of this virus were incredibly disruptive, It has affected million of computers.
Working :
- The worm took advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability in Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS),
- which controls the security policy of local accounts causing crashes to the computer.
- It will also use the system resources to propagate itself to other machines through the Internet and infect others automatically.
Fact : The damage was estimated to have cost $18 billion. Jaschen was tried as a minor and received a 21 month suspended sentence.
5. Zeus
It was first identified in year 2009, Zesus is a Trojan horse and was made to infect Windows computers. It has managed to compromise over thousands of FTP accounts and computers from large multinational cooperations including Amazon, Oracle, Bank of America etc. Controllers of the Zeus botnet used it to steal the login credentials of social network, email and internet banking accounts.
In the US alone, it was estimated that more than 1 million computers were infected, with 25% in the US. About $70 million were stolen and in possession of the ring. 100 people were arrested in connection of the operation.
Fact : In late 2010, the creator of Zeus announced his retirement but many experts believe this to be false.
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