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Five Year Anniversary Of The Now Infamous Worm, I-Worm.Loveletter
May 4, 2005: On this date five years ago, hundreds of thousands of email boxes were suddenly filled with emails containing the enticing subject “ILOVEYOU”. While some of the emails came from strange email addresses others came from trusted sources, family and friends. However, the one thing all the emails had in common, the attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.VBS”. Likewise, the one thing that all the infected users shared was the curiosity and desire to click on that attachment. The result of the cleverly named attachment, combined with a lack of safe computing practices proved to be very costly as I-Worm.Loveletter became one of the first mass mailing worm outbreaks.
It has now been five years since the release of I-Worm.Loveletter, what has changed?
According to our Emergency Virus Response Team (EVRT), the answer is very little. While the overall sophistication of some worms have gradually increased and the motive for virus writing has altered (that’s another topic), virus authors today are still heavily relying on social engineering, that is naming their files creatively in an attempt to peek user curiosity and trick them into running their creations. Typically today, these filenames exploit high-profile celebrities (one of today’s most frequent being Paris Hilton) or hit movies and popular teen games (the population most likely to unknowingly execute a virus) or current world events.
Additionally, just like five years ago, email remains as one of the main forms of communication within corporations and individuals. It then comes as no surprise that the propagation of worms over email is so rampant.
Most importantly, people are people, and users are still blindly opening attachments. The sad part is that many worms in circulation are dependant on some sort of human interaction in order to spread. Practicing safe computing is critical in the fight against computer viruses. In fact if we take a look at the top five virus occurrences confirmed through our EVRT for the month of April 2005, we can see that all of them are nothing more than average email-based worms not much different in terms of complexity and spreading procedures than that of I-Worm.LoveLetter.
Steven Sundermeier
VP of Products and Services, Central Command, Inc.
Further information on Central Commmand and or its flagship product Vexira Antivirus can be seen at www.centralcommand.com or by contacting Central Command at +1-330-723-2062.
Central Command, EVRT, Vexira, Emergency Virus Response Team, EVRT are trademarks of Central Command, Inc. All other trademarks, trade names, and products referenced herein are property of their respective owners.
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