Word: bug
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Clearly, the Internet is still not ready for prime time. "Without architectural improvements," warns Jeff Carpenter of the CERT Coordination Center, a federally funded computer-security group affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, "we will see this again." The next time could be worse. Imagine what a well-designed Love Bug could do when we have become even more dependent on computer networks and those networks are wireless. An Internet outage could keep us not only from sending e-mail but also from gassing up the car or depositing our paychecks. Warns Symantec vice president Steve Cullen: "We're only fractionally...
...extraordinary efficacy of the Love Bug was caused partly by its timing, striking as it did on a busy weekday morning, but also by its seductiveness. It was a minor masterpiece of what hackers like to call "social engineering"--in other words, manipulating the rubes. Few of the lonely hearts among cubicle dwellers could resist its siren song. (This reporter couldn't--and paid the price in lost files...
From a technical standpoint, the Love Bug is not radically new. Hijacking your e-mail address, for example, has been done--most notably by Melissa. The difference this time was a mix of shrewdness and ruthlessness. While Melissa sent out its tainted e-mails one by one, sometimes overloading the very server that was supposed to distribute them, the Love Bug spewed them as a single batch--and it didn't stop at the first 50 names...
...passed copies of itself as well to everybody out there. (Imagine how receptive patrons of a singles chat room would be to a poisoned "love letter.") Nor would you have been protected if your computer was part of a so-called local area network, or lan. The Love Bug would leap that barrier like some hyperactive flea. And there's more. If you were surfing with Internet Explorer, it would reset your home page to a website in the Philippines, from which it would download a second virus--this one designed to round up all those treasured passwords on your...
...PHILIPPINES Hostages, terrorism, apparent origin of Love Bug. Imelda's shoes weren...