Word: bug
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bug infected 80% of all federal agencies, including both the Defense and State departments, leaving them temporarily out of e-mail contact with their far-flung outposts. Though Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon insisted there were other lines of secure communications available, the virus corrupted no fewer than four classified, internal Defense Department e-mail systems...
...York City's financial district, the bug hit early risers especially hard. "If I had been here a few minutes later, nothing would have happened," says Vincent Cecolini, an editor for the RIA Group, a publisher of financial books. By the time his company's computer technicians arrived, they found 2,000 corrupted messages in his Out box and spent the rest of the day wrestling with the damage. "I was terrorized," says Cecolini. "My stomach was in knots." Old Westbury, N.Y., businessman Kamal Dandona's experience was even more nightmarish. Organizer of a major Bombay film industry-awards show...
...major antivirus firms quickly posted antidotes--software to neutralize the bug--on their websites, but they were too late to prevent widespread chaos. Desperate for a cure, victims deluged the sites, making them all but inaccessible. McAfee received requests for help from 10,000 affected companies on the first day of the outbreak alone...
Alerted by their overseas offices, most multinationals escaped the Love Bug's full embrace. Tipped off by colleagues in England and Germany, computer-security personnel at AT&T's operations hub in New Jersey reported for duty by 6 a.m. to block the virus. Within hours, some 100 desktop machines were already infected, and technicians had to ditch more than 2 million infected e-mail messages. By contrast, colleges and universities, strongholds of Linux and Macintosh computer systems rather than the targeted Microsoft Windows, got off comparatively lightly...
...consensus among computer-security experts is that the Love Bug is the biggest virus outbreak in history--"by at least threefold," says ICSA.net's Tippett. Agrees McAfee president and CEO Gene Hodges: "It's clear at this point that this is the most damaging and the most widespread virus outbreak ever." Symantec's Moritz is more cautious, conceding that it is No. 1 in numbers and rate of spread, but for sheer destructiveness he prefers last year's Explore.Zip, an especially vindictive virus designed to destroy Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files...