There is a bad side of every good thing and this stands true for computers as well. When computers are advancing in every field these days, virus attacks have become even more common. On one side creative minds develops a new technology each day, and on the other side notorious minds are busy in creating havoc through computer viruses. Are you aware how a file that you are downloading or how a funny email in your inbox can corrupt your system and all the files stored in it. If you have not met such an incident until now, then you should check out the list of some of the worst attacks of computer virus happed so far.
Elk Cloner
This virus attack is considered as one of the earliest virus hits of the world and it expanded through infected floppy disks of Apple II. You will be surprised to know that this as designed by a ninth-grade student, who placed it onto a gaming disk. When the game was played the 50th time, it turned the screen black and the poem “Elk Cloner” was read out. It had the capability of infiltrating through the chips and modifying the RAM as well.
Melissa
Another virus attack of the 90s was Melissa, which was spread through emails. The main features of this attack included:
- Whenever a user clicked on the attachment, the virus started to copy itself to fifty contacts in the address book.
- This virus attack became massive within a very short time and caused a lot of damage, which was estimated around 80 million dollars.
- The attachment was normally a word document and it infected the files when someone clicked on the word file.
This was a kind of worm, which led to the shutdown of internet mail systems in a number of organizations.
I LOVE YOU
This virus attack took place in 2000 and was first of its kind, as it tricked the users to open a file. The malicious program utilized mailing lists to reach to its target, so the users thought that the message was from a known source. The file was a VBS script, which contained a wave of junk mail. These ultimately deleted loads of files that involved personal files as well as multimedia and music files. The author of such a destructive virus is still unknown.
MyDoom and Storm
At the time when this virus attack emerged, it was the fastest expanding worm until that time. The destruction that this virus caused includes:
- It used to send loads of junk mail via an infected system and had a message as a subject
- Speculations about the virus attacking SCO Group was also made
- The author of this virus is also not known until now
Thousands of systems were destroyed in another such virus attack in 2007, which was due to a Trojan horse, named as Storm. In this case, the Trojans installed backdoor programs in a system and expanded through spam emails with false attachments.