5 of the Worst Computer Viruses Ever

When we talk about a computer virus,  we usually mean any kind of code that design to do harm and spread itself to more computers. They make money by stealing your personal information. Different viruses can affect windows, mac, Linux computers and even the data servers. Antivirus programs helps, they they can have trouble doing with threats they have never seen before.

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Melissa virus

It spread through Microsoft’s outlook program and even though the attachment seemed like a innocent word document it was able to effect computers because of something called a macro. A macro is a specific kind of computer program that’s used to create shortcuts.  That meant it makes easier to edit a documents.

The ILOVEYOU virus

The ILOVEYOU virus which In 2000. And was successful because of social engineering around 45 million computers in just 2 days. And caused about $10 million dollars in damage.  They make file in your computer and if you don’t have backed up then you will loose all for documents.

Worm

The worm spread faster than any other virus ever had effecting 75000 computers in just 10 minutes.  The servers were all sending requests to thousands of other servers, which couldn’t handle all the traffic. Millions of servers were affected, and the internet went kaput for a while. It caused about $1.2 billion of damage before it was stopped. And the programmer behind it was never caught.

Storm worm

Storm worm was designed to be a invisible as possible, so that you couldn’t detect and destroy it. This way it was able to use for computer in background. The virus would connect your machine to what’s know as a bot-net , a collection of computers that form a network.  A bot-net can do all kinds of things, from launching coordinated attacks that slow down. It disabled the web server that keep a company going, to stealing password, banking, and identify information.

Mebroot

Mebroot is also a virus that slowly started to spread in 2007. And it’s main goal was to hook you up to a bot-net called torpig. It usually gets into your computer via a drive by download,  where you visit a malicious web page and the programs download in the background without you even knowing it. It tells your computer what to do right from the start. And then it steals all your personal information.

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