ILOVEYOU

From: Lamby   To: You

Subject: ILOVEYOU

kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me.

LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT

This page serves as a love letter to the ILOVEYOU worm, also known as the "Love Bug" or "Love Letter Worm". ILOVEYOU was created by Onel de Guzman and released into the world in 2000. De Guzman was a poor 24 year old at the time and struggling to pay for internet access. He created the worm to steal the passwords of infected users which he would use to log into their internet accounts. Originally he intended the virus to only spread in his home town of Manilla in the Philippines, but removed this ristriction out of curiosity thus allowing it to spread worldwide.

ILOVEYOU spread itself by first acessing the infected users adress book and emailing a copy of itself to all the users contacts. The virus would then be sent in an email with the subject "ILOVEYOU" and an attached file titled "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs". The virus used social engineering to entice the recipient to open the supposed love letter from a trusted contact. By taking advantage of the recipients desire for connection and their innate curiosity the virus is able to infect new computer. The worm also exploited a bug which would run scripts in emails when clicked, and a system setting which hid file extensions by default. This meant that the .vbs extension was hidden, and the file appeared as a simple .txt file.

Once a computer is infected the worm overwrites all JPG, JPEG, VBS, VBE, JS, JSE, CSS, WSH, SCT, DOC, and HTA files with copies of itself, and appends the .VBS file extension. Most files are replaced, but strangely MP3 and other sound related files are simply hidden. The worm then sends a copy of itself to each contact in the users adress book and downloads the Barok trogan, renamed "WIN-BUGFIX.EXE".