As technology becomes more and more powerful, it’s becoming increasingly important to have some form of Internet safety for personal and public computers alike. While computer technology is still fairly new when you think about it, there has still been a long history of computer viruses. Just like a regular virus, the computer viruses listed below quickly spread and caused mass panic.
Computer viruses have been around almost as long as computers themselves.
Computer Virus: The Melissa Virus
The Melissa virus was named after an exotic dance and created in 1999 as an infected Word document. When it was downloaded and opened, the Melissa virus would mail itself to the top 50 people in someone’s email address book. This would cause an increase in traffic and disrupt email services. The Melissa virus would also sometimes corrupt documents by adding a reference to the Simpsons inside a document. The Melissa virus reportedly caused over $80 million in damages.
Computer Viruses: ILoveYou Virus
The ILOVEYOU virus was estimated to have caused $10 billion in damages. As much as 10% of the world’s Internet-connected computers were believed to have been infected with the computer virus ILOCEYOU. The email attachment would send itself to everyone in the user’s mailing list and overwrite files on its own accord. This made computer’s unbootable. Since there were no laws about malware at the time, the two who created this virus were never charged. This did however lead to E-Commerce Law to address Internet security.
Computer Viruses: The Concept Virus
The Concept virus was actually shipped on a CD-ROM that was supplied by Microsoft in 1995. It was the first known virus to infect Microsoft Word documents. It took advantage of the fact that computer users were sharing documents via email. It was one of the most widespread computer viruses the world had seen at the time.
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