The most Dangerous virus… So this is tricky. Before 1990, the year in which the term malware was coined to designate software whose objective is to affect a network or a computer system, the word used to designate this type of code was virus, the which evidently had been taken from the medical vocabulary, due to the similarity in behavior between these digital entities and biological agents.
If a group of hackers wants to attack a large corporation and has the resources and time, they will end up doing so. It may cause more or less damage, but it will. But this is by no means new: the history of computing brings us endless viruses and malware that, more or less exponentially, affected hundreds of thousands or even millions of people and companies and that is why we will see some of the that stood out the most.
Features of this dangerous virus
▸Morris
One of the first major attacks in memory. In 1988, there were only about 60,000 computers with an internet connection worldwide, but this worm infected more than 10% of those users. His toll of victims was no small thing: at the time, the damages were estimated at about 96 million dollars.
▸CIH or Chernobyl
The CIH virus was a real headache for millions of Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME users. Once installed inside the computer, it ended up infecting and deleting the information from the entire computer. Sometimes it even affected the BIOS, so that the computer, once infected, was unable to boot. CIH affected more than 60 million users worldwide and caused economic damages of close to 1 billion dollars.
▸Melissa
Released in 1999, Melissa is the first virus to spread massively via email service. Melissa spread out when a user clicked on a link inserted in an email; when the list.doc attachment was clicked, the virus would go to the Microsoft Outlook contact directory and send an email with the message “Here is the document you requested … do not show it to anyone else; -) “
▸ILOVEYOU
This virus, dating from the year 2000, rewrites personal and system files and replicates itself over and over within the system. ILOVEYOU, considered the most harmful of computer viruses, still infects devices, most of them intentionally. Through an email with the subject I Love You and the attachment LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs, almost 10 million computers were infected, about 10% of all computers in the world in that year. It is estimated that the damage caused by this virus is around 10 billion dollars.
▸My Doom
My Doom may be the most contagious virus in history. This virus, which accessed computers through emails. The virus was spreading so fast that by 2004, between 16 and 25% of emails in the world had been infected by My Doom. This virus made it possible to take control of the device in order to launch Denial of Service Attacks, of which companies such as Google and Microsoft were victims, and to send junk mail (spam).
