As I said before, the Morris worm is the virus that many hackers copy for years to come. Not only that but the Melissa virus also sprang a surge of viruses that behaved that way as well. One of the most notable viruses that was inspired by these two aspects is the ILoveYou virus, also referred to as the Love bug.

This particular virus got spread through mass emails that used the subject line “I love you” in 2000. It is by far one of the most well-known computer viruses.

Following the wake of the Melissa virus, people heard of the damages that the virus caused. While many were concerned, that wasn’t the case for a Philippine computer science student. They set this particular virus free shortly after the Melissa virus was dealt with.

But what was so unique about this particular virus was that it had worm like behaviour.

First of all, it behaved similarly to the Melissa virus. It was sent as an email titled ILOVEYOU (or some variant) and included an attachment. But what was different was actually the attachment itself.

You see, the attachment was a VBS file, short for Visual Basic Script. What this meant was it infected a wide variety of files and hid itself within files on the users computer. What was also notable was that this “love letter” was then sent to everyone in the users address book rather than the top 50.

Because the worm was sent to so many people much faster, the damages it caused were more significant. Damages reported were roughly $6.7 billion.

What this tells us is that we need to be cautious and to make an effort in installing solid virus removal programs. Even though the Love bug is a thing of the past, clearly people are still being inspired to create viruses. After all, as of 2012, most regard the ILOVEYOU virus to be the tenth-most virulent computer virus in history.