There are viruses worms adware Trojans and rootkits which are hard to detect and can give attackers control of your machine Perhaps even more frightening are ransomware attacks where someone gets a hold of your data Sometimes sensitive data and makes you pay to get it back Today we'll look at some of the biggest attacks on a computer.
The world's most dangerous computer viruses. Number one: SQL slammer/sapphire This one caused havoc in the USA in 2003 It's thought that it cost those who were hit in all about 1 billion dollars It affected web servers leading to bank ATMs crashing It messed with continental airlines electronic ticketing and it blocked 27 million people from the internet even Seattle's 911 services were affected as Wired explains slammer used an attack on one type of software but then infected machines would spread this worm through the net. The New York Times writes that what was so worried about this virus was Its virulence it infected 75,000 servers in just 10 minutes. It was stopped eventually by patches and antivirus software. But the creator of this virus is still unknown. It also reappeared briefly in 2016 coming from IP addresses in the USA China Mexico, Ukraine Vietnam, Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Thailand Number 2, Melissa. The villain behind this virus named it after an exotic dancer It began as an infected Word document posted on an alt. sex Usenet group if that was opened. It would send itself to 50 people on someone's Microsoft Outlook email program. That might not sound too bad. But it created mayhem when emails were being sent at a rate that messed with companies and big corporations so much so that in 1999 Microsoft shut down incoming email Users would get a message such as Here is that document you asked for don't show anyone else and there was an attachment with it according to one source. It cost people governments and companies in all about 1.2 billion dollars Now anyone watching this show should know that you should never open attachments that look a bit sketchy. But it seems back in those days people weren't yet? So savvy the creator of the virus was caught and sentenced to ten years in prison But only served 20 months with a $5,000 five member three, Anna Kournikova This virus was the brainchild of a 20 year old Dutch guy named Jan DeWit He used the good-looking tennis player, Anna Kournikova as bait you basically would receive an email saying you had a photo of her. But if you clicked on the file it launched a viral visual basic script that meant everyone in your address book was forwarded the same thing this affected millions of people and Overloaded servers all over the world this gave the young duit afraid as he didn't think it would cause so much of a problem sources said that by the time he understood what the worm did he had conferred with his parents and decided to turn himself in to The police he was lucky though and got away with just having to do 150 hours of community service The virus was even in an episode of the sitcom friends number 4 Sir camp this nasty worm also made Microsoft Windows systems its target again it spread far and wide as it sent itself to people in your email address book you Usually but not always saw the following message I send you this file in order to have your advice What was clever about this virus is that it would choose random files from your computer and send them to others This was particularly bad for governments who don't want random files being sent out It said it affected 12% of computers in North America and 11% of computers in Europe CNET writes that it cost 1 billion dollars in damages related to cleaning infected systems and to lost productivity It also caused some blushes No one has ever been arrested for creating this number 5 Code Red estimates on the damage caused by Code Red range in the billions Webpages that were affected suddenly got the message Welcome to worm comm hacked by Chinese norian explains the HTTP requests exploits unknown buffer overflow vulnerability Which allows the worm to run on your computer? The malicious code is not saved as a file but is inserted into and then run directly from memory. It has been called one of the most sophisticated attacks ever that almost brought down the internet infecting Microsoft Internet Information server Which many websites run on it was what is called a distributed denial-of-service attack Which means overwhelming websites with too much traffic which brings them down? According to Scientific American, it might not have been China who was the culprit though? There were many investigations But ultimately no one knows where it came from number 6 configure Now we come to the costly infections Configure is said to be the most destructive worm of all and it cost those infected around nine billion dollars It was discovered in 2008 and has in its lifetime infected as many as fifteen million computers It affected police departments in the UK as well as the military and messed with their operations It infects Windows operating systems and it lasted a long time as it kept getting past patches and antivirus software It's a bit of a mystery to security experts But they know it takes over a machine and then infects other machines in the network number seven. I love you you have to love the name of this nasty virus a bit like other things we have talked about it comes as an email with The words I love you in the subject line. Well, that sounds nice as so many businesses use outlook It's spread fast because folks open the attachment once they did that Everyone else in that address book got the same email not only did it spread quickly But it also deleted many of your files including every JPEG and mp3 it reached 45 million people in one day in 2000 it was so big that Ford Motor Company shut down its email It was a little like Melissa, but it sent mail to all your contacts and deleted personal files Even the Pentagon CIA and the British Parliament shut down their emails The virus was eventually linked to some young programmers in the Philippines and it's thought the cost of this virus was around fifteen billion dollars number eight so big this happened in 2003 and included a worm and a Trojan horse all in one you'd get an email with any number of subject lines such as Re wicked screensaver or re-approved and then there would be an attachment CNN wrote in 2003. It was said at the time to be the fastest-growing virus ever it stopped Airlines from operating slowed down many major corporations and worried the government it mostly affected the USA a Cybersecurity expert wrote at its peak one out of 17 emails that we were processing was a copy of the so big F virus Certainly, we haven't seen numbers like this before It is spreading at a very fast rate and the volumes are high in the USA 40 million emails were scanned and half of them contained the virus it said it cost a massive 37 points 1 billion dollars and Finally number 9 my doom a fitting name for what? some people say was the costliest virus of all time with an estimated 38 billion dollars in damages in 2004 it infected one in every 12 emails spread via email and also via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks it was so big that Google was worried a reward of 250,000 was offered to anyone who helped catch the perpetrators people said it was someone in Russia But that has never been proven again, you would get an email and open the attachment then your friends would be emailed But because it also got into peer-to-peer sharing it spread fast to this date.
Thanks for reading.
