The ILOVEYOU virus wasn’t the last time people would experience an email virus. Wreaking havoc in the year 2000, one year later people had to face a new threat: Anna Kournikova.

For those keeping up with their sports, the name of this virus is named after the same tennis player Anna Kournikova. And this was made entirely by design. Authored by a 20-year old Dutch student named Jan De Wit who called himself OnTheFly, this worm was sent out to people February 11th 2001.

This was an email virus similar to ILOVEYOU and as the virus name would suggest, the email had a picture of Anna Kournikova. The idea behind this email was to trick people that the famous tennis player Anna Kournikova emailed them.

What happens next is the person would open the email, and open the attached file. If the user was operating a Microsoft Windows computer, the attachment wouldn’t display the picture but rather launch a Visual Basic Script (or vbs) and forward itself to everybody in their address book.

All of this behaviour is similar to the ILOVEYOU virus. Both are an email based virus targeting and spreading through Microsoft Outlook’s platform. The only big difference between these worms was Anna Kournikova didn’t corrupt data. Instead it disrupted numerous email servers across the globe.

But what’s more shocking about this virus is the process in which it was created. Other viruses up to this point took a few days work to create. But that wasn’t the case for this virus. According to De Wit, he downloaded a tool kit to help him make the virus. This cut down the time to make the virus considerably.

What would’ve taken a few days was squeezed into a morning. The virus was made on Sunday February 11th and was sent out the same day at about 3 pm.

As for De Wit himself, he took full responsibility. In fact, when he realized what the worm actually did he turned himself in in his hometown of Sneek on the 14th of February. This was after posting a confession that he created the virus on a website and sent it out to a newsgroup. The post was live on the 13th of February.

This confession also outlined his motivations for creating this virus. First was the fact he felt people hadn’t learned their lesson yet from the ILOVEYOU virus in that their security systems weren’t any better.

But aside admission and the regret of the damage, he also had some external blame for people. He blamed the rate of the infection to do with people who were entranced by the beauty of this tennis player. He explained that it was people’s own fault that they got infected.

For the record, De Wit also had a number of pinups on his website suggesting he was a massive fanboy of Kournikova.

While the damage done overall was little (the US reported damages of US$166,000), this was an example of virus information being readily available to people. And while that toolkit was later removed by the original programmer Buenos Aires, the fact remains that this information was becoming more and more available.

Not to mention more people had growing computer skills and had the ability to make these viruses.