ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as Love Letter, was a computer worm that attacked tens of millions of Windows personal computers on and after 5 May 2000 local time in the Philippines when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and the attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.". The first file extension 'VBS' was most often hidden by default on Windows computers of the time, leading unwitting users to think it was a n...
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ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as Love Letter, was a computer worm that attacked tens of millions of Windows personal computers on and after 5 May 2000 local time in the Philippines when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and the attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.". The first file extension 'VBS' was most often hidden by default on Windows computers of the time, leading unwitting users to think it was a normal text file. Opening the attachment activated the Visual Basic script. The worm did damage on the local machine, overwriting image files, and sent a copy of itself to the first 50 addresses in the Windows Address Book used by Microsoft Outlook.
Four things led to the success of ILOVEYOU.
Messages generated in the Philippines began to spread westwards through corporate email systems. Because the worm used mailing lists as its source of targets, the messages often appeared to come from acquaintances and were therefore often regarded as...
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