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Many of us at some point in time have had a computer start acting very strange
There are a lot of threats out there and many come in the form of viruses
computer viruses got their name because they act like viruses and
Replicate they infect lots of files on a machine and can be spread to another machine by doing things like sending files to someone else
Or using an infected USB Drive on another computer
Then you have 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 computers in this episode of the infographic show
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
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 worrying 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. Apparently 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 really 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 the 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 really 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 really 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. So big dot F breaks virus speed records
It was said at the time to be the fastest growing virus ever
it stopped Airlines from operating slowed down many major corporation 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 were 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 point 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
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Infographics or by clicking the link in the description. So can you add to this list?
Were you ever infected by a computer virus? Let us know in the comments?
Also, be sure to check out our other video called 10 most dangerous hackers of all time. Thanks for watching
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