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Sixteen years later and the ILOVEYOU worm is still amazing to watch

While May 4th may have been celebrated as Star Wars Day, something else rather important was lost in the noise: the 4th of May was also the 16th anniversary of the ILOVEYOU worm that caused an estimated $5.5 – $8.7 billion (R80 – R129 billion) in damages back in 2000.

An ingenious piece of malicious software, the worm (also sometimes called “Love Letter”) would start out as an unassuming email from someone in your email contact list. The subject would read “ILOVEYOU” and it would come with attachment called “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs”. The body of the email read “kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me.”

At this point an unassuming user, 16 years ago, would believe someone they knew was confessing their love, but opening the attachment would run the worm. The original version would then overwrite random files, usually making then unusable, and then it would propagate itself by re-sending that dangerous email to all of your contacts.

It’s a little scary to see in action, given its age and simplicity. YouTube content creator danooct1 shows it off:

As you can see, not only can the worm be used to cause quite a bit of damage, but it could also be easily modified to do even worse things to your PC.

While it’s not a problem now, it most certainly was sixteen years ago. Millions of PCs around the world were infected and governmental agencies had to shut down their mail systems. It was also many online citizens’ first experience with any kind of malicious software.

All of this was caused by a few dozen lines of code which you can read here, beginning life on May 4th, 2000.

 

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