In chronological order here are the 10 most destructive viruses of all time.
The 10 most destructive viruses
• CIH
• Blaster
• Melissa
• Sobig.F
• ILOVEYOU
• Bagle
• Code Red
• MyDoom
• SQL Slammer
• Sasser
1. CIH (1998)
Estimated Damage: 20 to 80 million, not counting the price of information destroyed.
Location: From Taiwan in June 1998, CHI is recognized as one of the most dangerous and destructive virus ever seen. The virus infects Windows executable files 95,98 and ME and was able to stay resident in memory of the infected computers and infect other executables.
Why?: What made it so dangerous was that soon affected many computers could rewrite data on the hard disk and leave it inoperable.
Trivia: CIH was distributed in one or the other major software as a demo game Activision "No".
2. Melissa (1999)
Damage Estimate: 300 to 600 million dollars
Location: A Wednesday March 26, 1999, W97M/Melissa became home to many revolving around the world. One estimate says that this script affects 15% to 20% of the world's computers.
Trivia: The virus used Microsoft Outlook to send further 50 of the users contact list. The message contained the phrase, "Here Is That You Asked document for ... do not show anyone else. ;-) "And was accompanied by an attached Word document, which was implemented by thousands of users and allowed the virus to infect computers and propagate through the network.
3. ILOVEYOU (2000)
Damage Estimate: 10 to 15 billion dollars
Location: Also known as "Loveletter" and "Love Bug", this was a Visual Basic script with an ingenious and irresistible candy: Promises of love. A May 3, 2000, the ILOVEYOU worm was first detected in Hong Kong and was transmitted via email with the subject "ILOVEYOU" and attachment, Love-Letter-For-YOU.TXT.VBS
Similarly, Melissa was sent to all contacts in Microsoft Outlook.
Why?: Thousands of users were attracted by the subject and clicked on the infected attachment. The virus also took the liberty of overwriting music files, pictures and more.
Trivia: As the Philippines had no laws that talk about virus writing the author of ILOVEYOU was not charged.
4. Code Red (2001)
Damage Estimate: $ 2.6 billion
Location: Code Red was a worm that infected computers for the first time July 13, 2001. It was a virulent bug because its objective was to attack computers that have the server (IIS) Microsoft's Internet Information Server. The worm was able to exploit a major vulnerability of this server.
Trivia: Also known as "Bady" Code Red was designed for maximum damage. In less than a week infected almost 400,000 servers and over a 1,000,000 in its short history.
5. SQL Slammer (2003)
Damage Estimate: Because SQL Slammer appeared on Saturday the economic damage was low. However, this attack 500,000 servers.
Trivia: SQL Slammer, also known as "Sapphire", dates from January 25, 2003 and its main focus is server, the virus was a 376-byte file that generated a random IP address and sent asimismoa these IPs. If the IP running under Microsoft's SQL Server Desktop Engine unpatched could be sent back to other IPs at random.
Slammer infected computers in 10 minutes 75.000.
6. Blaster (2003)
Damage Estimate: 2 to 10 billion dollars, hundreds of thousands of infected computers.
Location: The summer of 2003 became known Blaster also called "Lovsan" or "MSBlast".
The virus was detected on August 11 and spread rapidly in just two days. Conveyed through a vulnerability in Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and when it was triggered open a dialog in which the shutdown was imminent.
Trivia: Hidden in the code was curious MSBLAST.EXE topics:
"I just want to say LOVE YOU SAN!" And "billy gates why do you Make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software! "
"I just want to say I love you san!" And "billy gates Why do possible? for making money and fix your software! "
7. Sobig.F (2003)
Damage Estimate: 5 to $ 10 billion and more than one million infected computers.
Location: Sobig also attacked in August 2003 a horrible month for security. The most destructive variant of this worm was Sobig.F, who attacked the August 19 generating over 1 million copies of itself within the first 24 hours.
Trivia: The virus spread via e-mail and attached files as application.pif thank_you.pif. When activated, transmitting.
On September 10, 2003 the virus has also disabled and was no longer a threat, Microsoft offered in its day to that $ 250,000 to identify its author.
8. Bagle (2004)
Damage Estimate: $ 10 million and counting ...
Location: Bagle is a sophisticated worm that made its debut on January 18, 2004.
The code systems infected with a traditional mechanism, attaching files to an email and spread it.
The real danger of Bagle is that there are 60 to 100 variants of it, when the worm infects a computer open a TCP port that was used by an application to remotely access the system data.
Curiosities: The Bagle.B variant was designed to stop the January 28, 2004 but numerous other variants of the virus continue to operate.
9. MyDoom (2004)
Damage Estimate: Internet performance lags by 10% and page loading by 50%.
Location: In a few hours of January 26, 2004, MyDoom went around the world. Was transmitted via mail by sending an error message of course but also attacked the shared folders of users of the Kazaa network.
Curiosities: MyDoom was programmed to stop after the February 12, 2004.
10. Sasser (2004)
Damage Estimate: $ 10 million
Location: April 30, 2004 was its release date and was destructive enough to hang some French agency communications satellites.
Also managed to cancel flights many airlines.
Curiosities: Sasser was not transmitted via mail and did not require users to spread. Each time the worm was Windows 2000 and Windows XP this was not replicated to date, infected systems experiencing great instability.
Sasser was written by a young German of 17 years who spread the virus in their 18 birthday. As he wrote the code to be less standing out well but was found guilty of computer sabotage.