#Love worm virus code
There were numerous hints in the code that implied it came from Manila in the Philippines, but given that all malware is, by definition, untrustworthy, text strings in the virus can’t blindly be believed: The virus also tried to spread via IRC, short for Internet Relay Chat, which was far and away the most popular instant messaging system back in 2000. In other words, the original content could not be extracted from infected files, so the after effects of a Love Bug attack were a bit like a ransomware attack today, but with no way to restore the originals except to reload a recent backup.įor reasons we can only imagine, infected MP3 files were marked hidden after infection, thus vanishing both literally by being overwitten and figuratively by dropping out of sight. Sadly for victims, infected files were blindy replaced with the Love Bug code, rather than being parasitically infected by having the virus inserted at the start. VBE) as well as Javacript, various web-related files, JPEG images and MP3 files: ILOVEYOU also replicated itself across computers and networks, finding and infecting files including any existing Visual Basic files (.VBS and. This really was one of history’s “fast burner” virus outbreaks. Webmail was in its infancy in 2000 and despite the popularity of Hotmail (which is now, of course, Outlook), many home users still used the Outlook program to send and receive mail via their ISP and very many companies used Outlook via a Microsoft Exchange server on their own network. The fact that the virus would only generate its deluge of infectious spam if you had the Outlook email client installed and configured correctly didn’t really hamper its spread much back then. Worse still, back then Outlook would run attached scripts right way if you double-clicked on them, without warning you that you were actively launching a program that could take over your computer instead of passively opening a file to take a look at it.
vbs and was therefore a Visual Basic Script in disguise.
#Love worm virus windows
Then, as today, Windows suppressed file extensions by default, so few users would have seen that the innocent-looking TXT file in fact ended in. Body text: kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me.
Whether that was simply a typo or a Freudian slip we shall probably never know:Īs shown above, the code used Visual Basic automation to get the Outlook program to do the email sending, retrieving every entry in your address book, both individuals and groups, and spamming out emails that looked like this: Intriguingly, the author mis-spelled the variable names mail and mailad (short for mail address) in the code as male and malead. The Love Bug virus was also known ILOVEYOU because it spewed itself out in emails with those three words, jammed together as one, in the subject line.
(We doubt this version is one you want to sing along to the Beatles’ tune, but if you aren’t familiar with the 1960s original, you can check out the album cover and listen to it online.)
The trick we've known for all these years, That makes the Love Bug computer virus 20 years old today, depending on your timezone and how early in the infection chain you were. Five years ago to the day, we wrote up our reminiscence of an infamous and globally troublesome computer pandemic from the turn of the century.