Unfortunately for him, this allowed the authorities to trace the file back to him, so they arrested him before a week had passed. Once caught, he worked along with the FBI to capture other virus writers —the Anna Kournikova virus author being the most well-known case. His cooperation earned him a reduced sentence 20 months and a USD fine — he was supposed to serve ten years.
Conficker, or Downup or Downadup, is a worm of unknown origin for Windows that first showed its ugly face in This malware proved how dangerous the overabundant security gaps in Windows could become as it exploited them to create a botnet.
Nine million systems became hosts to Cornficker in every imaginable country , including places like private businesses, governments, individuals.
Very few worms managed to infect so many computers and do so much damage — nine billion USD. The virus used a vulnerability in a Windows network service that Microsoft took too long to patch. The active infection reset account lockout practices, blocked the Windows update and antivirus websites, turned off the services that could identify it, and locked out specific user accounts.
Once all those changes are affected, the worm downloads and installs another piece of software that turns the computer into a slave in a botnet. Here are a few more worthy mentions extending the legacy of the worst computer viruses:. The difference between a virus and a worm is very straightforward to understand. A virus is a parasitic code that needs another program to activate it or make it work.
On the other hand, a worm can run without any help. Viruses and worms get into systems in many ways. For instance, the most frequent method of getting infections right now is to click on attachments, open files, or follow link s in unwanted emails.
How is that possible? Because many a virus will impersonate somebody else to persuade you to open that link or launch that file. But, since not every virus works the same way, you cannot generalize how your computer should act upon getting a virus. Nonetheless, you can certainly avoid a few careless habits that often lead to virus infections on your computer, phone, or any other device. Do you have an email from AppleSupport gmail.
Likewise, be paranoid about attachments. Your late distant granny would have preferred contacting you directly instead of asking somebody else to hand over her remaining property to you. Not every email you receive is legit. Today, digital advertising is the bane of computer security. This is because a lot of malware spreads through ads on malicious websites. You can prevent this risk by avoiding fishy sites.
But, of course, not all the ads in the world are dangerous. Or you could adopt a more active measure. For example, some VPN services can block ads. Likewise, you can use the more dedicated tools — the adblockers — for this purpose.
While free WiFi hotspots are an attractive marketing strategy from hotels and other public places, they are seldom secure. Often, these public WiFi harbor cybercriminals who keep looking for victims to infect their devices and steal data. Unless you have a robust antivirus and a VPN on your device, avoid connecting to such free WiFi to protect your online privacy and security.
Just open your antivirus and see what it tells you. For example, Windows 10 has a Windows Security feature, which includes an impressive protection tool against viruses, the Windows Defender. You can even turn on its notifications to watch when and how it scans your system. The study of computer malware is not an established science at all.
In fact, much of it relies on artistic intuition, ironically. So how did we choose our top twelve entries for the most malicious computer viruses? We considered estimates of lost work, infection length, the estimated number of infections. Also, cleaning up a virus takes resources, and we considered that too.
The truth is that nobody has any accurate data. Still, we considered several reports and shared with you something that was somehow common among the various sources. The world spends at least 55 billion USD cleaning up and repairing the damage that results from the spread of viruses and worms. Mydoom has the record for damage, at 38 billion, but there have been many other strong hits. However, the future looks bright regarding malware and virus prevention measures.
Just keep your system updated at all times, get a good antivirus suite, and apply cybersecurity best practices to stay safe online. Above all, remain aware. Keep visiting our site to educate yourself on privacy, anonymity, and security issues so you can always keep yourself a step ahead of the rest. Stay safe. Stay private. Ali Qamar is the founder of PrivacySavvy, which he started out of the sheer passion for making every internet user privacy savvy.
Ali has always been concerned about security and privacy for the general public and is very libertarian. Even before Edward Snowden appeared, he has been a privacy advocate even before Edward Snowden appeared with his revelations about NSA's mass surveillance. Ali graduated with a computing degree from the leading IT college in Pakistan, so he boasts a background in this area. He has an accountable understanding of the technical sides of encryption, VPNs, and privacy. Ali is regularly quoted in the privacy and security reports by the local press.
Ali is naturally attracted to transforming things. Exclusive offer. Fastest among the VPNs we tested. Since the message often came to new victims from someone familiar, they were more likely to open it, making ILOVEYOU a proof-of-concept for the effectiveness of social engineering. The Code Red worm was a "file less" worm—it existed only in memory and made no attempt to infect files on the system.
Taking advantage of a flaw in the Microsoft Internet Information Server, the fast-replicating worm wreaked havoc by manipulating the protocols that allow computers to communicate and spread globally in just hours. Eventually, as noted in Scientific American , compromised machines were used to launch a distributed denial of service attack on the Whitehouse.
One of the most recent of the major viruses came out in , Heartbleed burst onto the scene and put servers across the Internet at risk. Heartbleed, unlike viruses or worms, stems from a vulnerability in OpenSSL, a general purpose, open source cryptographic library used by companies worldwide.
OpenSSL periodically sends out "heartbeats" to ensure that secure endpoints are still connected. Users can send OpenSSL a specific amount of data and then ask for the same amount back—for example, one byte. If users claim they're sending the maximum allowed, 64 kilobytes, but only send a single byte, the server will respond with the last 64 kilobytes of data stored in RAM, notes security technologist, Bruce Schneier , which could include anything from user names to passwords to secure encryption keys.
For more than 60 years, computer viruses have been part of collective human consciousness, however what was once simply cyber vandalism has turned quickly to cybercrime. Worms, Trojans and viruses are evolving. Hackers are motivated and clever, always willing push the boundaries of connection and code to devise new infection methods.
The future of cybercrime seems to involve more PoS point of sale hacks, and, perhaps, the recent Moker remote access Trojan is a good example of what's to come. Tired of customers making illegal copies of their software, they developed Brain, which replaced the boot sector of a floppy disk with a virus. The virus, which was also the first stealth virus, contained a hidden copyright message, but did not actually corrupt any data. The introduction of reliable, speedy broadband networks early in the 21st century changed the way malware was transmitted.
No longer confined to floppy disks or company networks, malware was now able to spread very quickly via email, via popular websites or even directly over the Internet.
As a result, modern malware began to take shape. The threat landscape became a mixed environment shared by viruses, worms and Trojans—hence the name "malware" as an umbrella term for malicious software. One of the most serious epidemics of this new era was the LoveLetter, which appeared on May 4, As Securelist notes, it followed the pattern of earlier email viruses of the time, but unlike the macro viruses that had dominated the threat landscape since , it didn't take the form of an infected Word document, but arrived as a VBS file.
It was simple and straightforward, and since users hadn't learned to be suspicious of unsolicited emails, it worked. Since the message often came to new victims from someone familiar, they were more likely to open it, making ILOVEYOU a proof-of-concept for the effectiveness of social engineering. The Code Red worm was a "file less" worm—it existed only in memory and made no attempt to infect files on the system. Taking advantage of a flaw in the Microsoft Internet Information Server, the fast-replicating worm wreaked havoc by manipulating the protocols that allow computers to communicate and spread globally in just hours.
Eventually, as noted in Scientific American , compromised machines were used to launch a distributed denial of service attack on the Whitehouse. One of the most recent of the major viruses came out in , Heartbleed burst onto the scene and put servers across the Internet at risk.
Heartbleed, unlike viruses or worms, stems from a vulnerability in OpenSSL, a general purpose, open source cryptographic library used by companies worldwide. OpenSSL periodically sends out "heartbeats" to ensure that secure endpoints are still connected. Users can send OpenSSL a specific amount of data and then ask for the same amount back—for example, one byte.
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