ever since the dawn of the digital age hackers have been coding all sorts of malicious software some are just annoying pranks While others are so disastrous they disrupt entire infrastructures and cause Millions if not billions of dollars in Damages join us as we look at some of the most dangerous computer viruses of all time for convenience we've included other malware including worms and Trojan horses amazing number 10 so big this was a series of computer worms that infected millions of computers throughout 2003 there were a total of six iterations of the virus each labeled with
the letters a to F the sixth one so big F held the record as the most transmitted virus in history infecting up to a million computer systems within a single day the virus was engineered brilliantly to for maale servers into letting it through as a legit non-spam message and upon opening would send copies of itself to the users's entire email list damages caused by soig is estimated to be over 30 billion the creators are still unknown and Microsoft has offered $250,000 for info leading to their capture number nine I love you this romantically named virus
was created in 2000 by two Filipino programmers who used clever social engineering tactics to get the virus to spread the file I love you was a script disguised as a normal txt file that sounded like a confession from a secret admirer it lowered people's defenses making them curious to know their Secret Valentine but once opened the file immediately sent copies of itself to the users email contacts it would also proceed to overwrite files within itself making the computers unbootable a whopping 10% of the entire world's population got infected wreaking havoc on systems worldwide wide causing
$1 billion in Damages it was so bad that entire governments and large companies had to take their mailing systems offline to avoid getting infected the programmers were never charged as there weren't laws on malware at the time this has led to the enactment of the e-commerce law to prevent similar incidents number eight storm worm like many others the storm worm propagated through email but instead of a file attachment there would be a link to a website an interesting Link at that with a catchy clickbait title tempting gullible users towards it but when clicked nothing happened
or so it seemed instead of destroying computers stormw worm aimed at taking over them in the background the invisible Trojan Horse would allow hackers to remotely control the computers to do all sorts of stuff including illegal activities such as stealing passwords money and identity manipulation storm worm started spreading in 2007 and within months Drew into a wide network of botn Nets from the millions of computers it controlled the programmers who still aren't caught would then sell the networks to other criminals thankfully the botn net is now wiped out almost completely number seven code red this
2001 virus was discovered by employees of a digital security company while drinking Code Red Mountain Dew hence its name it spread through computers that used Microsoft's IIs web server and exploited the system buffer overflow problem it was extremely difficult to detect as its size was only about 3 Koby and ran mostly on memory instead of dis space once activated it would replicate itself like crazy and eat up a lot of system resources code red gained infamy when it managed to infect the White House's server and put down the US government's website leaving behind a message
saying hacked by Chinese Something That Grew into a popular meme it's unlikely the Chinese were really behind it although no culprits were ever named a patch was released fixing the problem but $2 billion in productivity had already been lost the virus managed to affect 2 million servers about a third of all IIs servers at the time number six Slammer on the 25th of January 2003 the entire internet broke down in South Korea for 12 hours the virus also affected other things around the globe such as Airlines and Bank ATMs connections either stopped completely or became
extremely slow even for 2003 standards all this was caused by Slammer a worm that specifically targeted Microsoft SQL servers by taking advantage of a bug present in the software what seemed like an ordinary request for information was actually a code written to send out more copies of the worm to other servers it grew incredibly fast doubling in size every 8 seconds millions of servers got infected before it was fin finally stopped causing $1.2 billion in damage the people behind it were never caught and Microsoft had actually released the patch to fix the bug much earlier
before the virus spread but many just hadn't installed it yet number five Melissa this one appeared quite early back in 1999 and was the first ever mass mailing macro virus for the new internet age created by David Smith and named after a stripper he knew from Florida the Melissa was spread through emails with an attachment by the name list. doc it was accompanied by a short note saying here is the document you asked for don't show anyone else like the I love you it depended on people's Curiosities to get them clicking and boy did it
work once the attachment file is clicked it would replicate and send itself to the user's email contacts and would sometimes corrupt documents by inserting quotes from the cartoon character Bart Simpson the FBI managed to trace the file back to its creator and Smith was arrested with within a week of the outbreak he later cooperated with law enforcement in capturing other hackers and malware creators enabling him to get a reduced sentence of only 20 months and a fine of $5,000 the Melissa virus was the fastest virus of its time causing $80 million in Damages number four
sassa in 2004 18-year-old programmer Sven Yasin created sassa a worm that primarily targeted Windows the worm itself didn't do much other than than annoyingly slow down and crash computers but collectively the results were incredibly disruptive millions of computers worldwide got infected including critical infrastructures such as public transport Airlines and hospitals unlike other viruses Sasa didn't spread through email instead it randomly scanned vulnerable systems and instructed them to download the virus it then attacked the local security Authority subsystem service causing the systems to crash $18 million of damage was recorded Yasin was caught but as a
minor got off with a light sentence number three my Doom in 2004 my Doom took I love you's place as the fastest growing email worm it was discovered by a maafe employee in 2004 who named it based on the line my dom present in the program's code which meant my domain but adding that extra o just made it sound a lot cooler the Creator who still hasn't been caught is believed to have been paid to create the virus in order to attack large tech companies the worm spreads Itself by deceiving email users by appearing as
an error message that reads mail transaction failed but upon clicking the message the file sends itself to the user's email contacts and copies itself to any PTP programs folder to propagate itself through that Network this results in a back door being opened that allows remote access my Doom is still somewhat active today in other forms and has called caused upwards of $38 billion in Damages number two me rout this is a sophisticated trojan horse that started spreading around 2007 the way me rout works is by infecting your computer as you visit some malicious websites it
would then overwrite your master reboot record enabling it to tell your computer what to do upon startup which in this case is to connect to its partner in crime Tor Pig Tor Pig would then proceed to lurk silently in your browser keeping track of all the information you type in your passwords your account number and every website you visit within a year meout Tor Pig managed to steal info from over half a million bank accounts the virus creators are still at large number one Leap many Apple Fanboys claim that Mac computers are impenetrable to viruses
by running a tightly closed system Apple has managed to protected software preventing Hackers from getting into their system as easily as they could with normal PCS but the myth of their invincibility was shattered with the debut of leap a in 2006 also known as Ooma a this virus utilized Apple's IAT instant messaging program once a Mac is infected it will send a message to other users in the iat's contact list in order to propagate itself the payload isn't much though as it only prevents an infected application however it's shown the world that Macs are not
as impenetrable as we thought Paving away for hackers to create more customized virus in the future have you been victim to any viruses or are you one to shy away from dodgy emails let us know in the comments [Music] below
