7 Deadliest Computer Viruses ...

Originating in the Philippines, this virus could copy itself many times and hide among the folders on the recipient’s hard drive. It could also form new files to the person’s registry keys, replace files with itself, and send itself via email to friends of the recipient or through chat. It was also capable of stealing passwords and then emailing this information to the hacker’s email.

Read backwards the name of this virus spells Admin. In 2001, this virus propagated very rapidly. It infiltrated the Internet quickly and targeted Internet servers. This viral worm was able to create a back door into the operating system of the infected PC. The hacker behind Nimda would then have access to functions on the infected computer and overall full control of the entire machine.

2006 brought about the Storm Worm virus. The virus would come disguised as an email with the subject heading ‘230 dead as storm batters Europe’. There are actually many names for this Trojan horse program. Hackers would use this virus to gain remote control of computers and then send span across the net with the infected computer. Sometimes the heading would be changed by different hackers, but it was still the same virus.

David Smith created this virus in 1999. It was supposedly named after an exotic dancer. This virus would replicate and send itself to the top 50 people in the email list of the recipient who opened the email with the virus. Although this virus didn’t destroy anything inside the computer, it clogged up the networks to the extent that some businesses had to shut down email programs until the virus was eliminated.

This worm appeared in 2001 and mostly affected Windows NT and Windows 2000. When a computer encountered this virus it would begin overwriting adjacent memory, due to the amount of information being force fed to the computer. The problem was that both of these Windows operating systems had a buffer overflow problem and this is what allowed Code Red I and II to wreak havoc on them.

Just as with Nimda, My Doom created a back door into a computer’s operating system. There were two triggers for this virus; one initiated the virus on February 1, 2004 and the second stopped the virus on the twelfth of the same month and year. Even in that short amount of time, severe damage was done. Another outbreak of the same virus occurred later in the year, but this time it searched email addresses and search engines. The virus spread through email between networks and crashed search engines by bombarding them with search requests.

Continental Airlines flights were canceled in 2003 due to this virus. There were also outages in Seattle’s 911 services. The ATM service at the Bank of America crashed, as did many other important systems. There were over 1 billion dollars in damages caused by the SQL Slammer before anti-virus software was able to stop it. Almost half of the main servers on the Internet were infected within the first 15 minutes of this virus’ existence. The number of victims doubled every few seconds.

It isn’t difficult to monitor your emails so that you don’t accidentally open a virus. I won’t click on any email that I don’t recognize the sender. When I sign up for things online, they usually send a confirmation request right away. I can then match the incoming email with the site I’m on and know that they go together. I know this isn’t always the case, but this tactic and updating my spyware often have kept my computer safe. Have you ever experienced a computer virus?

Top Photo Credit: wizardwig