Word: bug
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Because of its implicit, fatally attractive message--Oh, just give me a glance, I bear friendly tidings from a loving admirer!--headline writers immediately (and irresistibly) nicknamed it the Love Bug. But there was nothing lovable about it. Before it spent itself--in its first incarnation, it was truly a 24-hour virus--it would affect tens of millions of computers, eventually ring up a toll as high as $10 billion in lost work hours and reopen troubling questions about the safety and security of our vital electronic lifelines. By almost any measure, it was the most damaging virus ever...
...this clue suggested that the word might have been inserted as a deliberate smoke screen to fool the computer sleuths. By week's end, the work of investigators was further complicated by the appearance of a number of copycat viruses, created either by others or by the Love Bug's author...
...businesses throughout the Continent. As much as 70% of the computers in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden were laid low. The companies affected made up a Who's Who of industry and finance, including Ford, Siemens, Silicon Graphics and Fidelity Investments. Even Microsoft, whose software was the Love Bug's special target, got so badly battered that it finally severed outside e-mail links at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters...
Governments, too, felt the pain. In London, Parliament shut down its servers before the Love Bug's assault. "This affectionate greeting," intoned Commons leader Margaret Beckett, "contains a virus which has immobilized the House's internal communication system...
...systems forced an atypical silence in the halls of Congress, as well as some unusual scrambling. Arriving early on a day dominated by the death of John Cardinal O'Connor, New York Congressman Joseph Crowley's press secretary, Josh Straka, logged on to his computer only to unleash the bug. He spent the rest of the day manually faxing press releases. "My stress level was through the roof," he says...