The maker of i love you virus

Cluley raced to the airport to catch a flight to London, and even traded phone batteries with a generous taxi driver as the constant stream of messages drained his Nokia cellphone of power. When he landed in the United Kingdom, a car was waiting to whisk him to a TV studio to discuss what had by now become one of the biggest tech stories in the world.

Soon after starting business on May 4, the United Kingdom's House of Commons had to take its overloaded email servers offline, as did the Ford Motor Company and even Microsoft , whose Outlook software was the primary means of spreading the virus. For most people, Outlook was email. Unlike today, when many email services are run via centralized servers — think Outlook. This could be janky, slow and startling insecure. Back then, Cluley said, "many companies didn't have in place filters their email gateways to try and stop spam, let alone viruses.

Even though the United States had advance warning, the virus spread just as quickly there — as almost everyone seemed apparently unable to resist opening the "love letter.

From there, almost every major military base in the country — barring a handful that didn't use Outlook — watched as their email services were crippled and forced offline for hours as the problem was fixed. The NIPC soon sent out an alert warning of a "new, in-the-wild worm virus identified as LoveLetter or LoveBug [that] is being propagated globally via e-mail," but it came too late to prevent much of the US government and military, as well as dozens of private companies, from being affected.

As anti-virus companies slowly began rolling out patches, stemming the damage and enabling companies to come back online, attention within the FBI turned to tracking down those responsible. The investigation was led by the New York field office, which soon found evidence pointing back east, beyond Hong Kong, to the Philippines. Both the technical fix and first break in the case came so fast because, for all its rapid dissemination around the world, the ILOVEYOU virus was clumsily coded and startlingly unsophisticated.

It mashed together several existing pieces of malware and did little to hide its workings. It was no more complex than any of the other thousands and thousands of viruses we'd seen that day. But of course, this one was particularly successful at spreading itself. As well as containing the blueprint for defeating it, the code also included some lines pointing to the identity of its author.

It contained two email addresses — spyder super. While investigators were wary that those clues could be a smokescreen, the virus also communicated with a server hosted by the Manila-based Sky Internet , to which it sent passwords scraped from victims' computers. Sky quickly took the server offline, which stopped at least part of the virus in its tracks. Without the servers to send information to — and it appears the virus's author was never able to access what was sent to the server, or at least act upon it — ILOVEYOU became purely an engine of chaos and destruction.

It churned through email inboxes around the world and deleted files, while not actually serving the apparent original purpose of scraping passwords. Four days after the virus began spreading, Philippines police searched an apartment in Manila and seized computer magazines, telephones, disks, wires and cassette tapes.

They also arrested one of the occupants, Reomel Ramones. Ramones, a curly-haired year-old who worked at a local bank, seemed like an unlikely computer hacker, and investigators wondered if they had arrested the wrong guy. Attention turned to the apartment's two other residents: Ramones' girlfriend, Irene de Guzman, and her brother, Onel. Onel de Guzman — who was not in the apartment when it was raided, and could not be found — was a student at AMA Computer College.

The college was home to a self-described hacking group, the now-defunct GRAMMERSoft, which specialized in helping other students cheat on their homework. While police could not prove initially that de Guzman was a member, officials at the school shared with them a rejected final thesis he had written, which contained the code for a program bearing a startling resemblance to ILOVEYOU.

In the draft thesis, de Guzman wrote that the goal of his proposed program was to "get Windows passwords" and "steal and retrieve internet accounts [from] the victim's computer. Log in. Options Help Chat with a consultant. Include archived documents. This content has been archived , and is no longer maintained by Indiana University.

Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable. This contains instructions for editing the registry. If you make any error while editing the registry, you can potentially cause Windows to fail or be unable to boot, requiring you to reinstall Windows. Edit the registry at your own risk. Always back up the registry before making any changes. The virus has spread worldwide and infected computers from local to confidential organizations.

Up to 10 percent of all worldwide computers connected to the internet was thought to have been infected. Even The Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency CIA , and the British Parliament and many large corporations completely shut down their mail systems in order to protect themselves from the virus. However, he admitted that he never meant for the virus to spread globally.

Introduction : This virus name I love you referred to as a love bug or a love letter. It infected over 10 million computers and it started spreading as an email message with the subject I love you.

Many users consider the. When the user opens the attachment the Visual Basic script gets activated and damages the local machine. This virus is also capable of overwriting any files like images, audio, and it then sends a copy of it to all the addresses in the Windows Address book.

It made the virus spread much faster than any spreading of email worms. It was created by a year-old resident in Manilla, Philippines. Formation of the virus : It was created by a year-old college student.