Word: bug
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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...
Even after having to temporarily release the Manila man they had in custody for insuffucient evidence, Filipino investigators and their FBI buddies say they've got a list of 10 suspects in their hunt for the progenitor of the Love Bug, all connected to a Manila computer school - including the man, his girlfriend and her sister. But the problem with police action is that it's all cure and no prevention. And the sad fact, says TIME technology writer Lev Grossman, is that there will always be another Love Bug, another Michelangelo, another Melissa. And there's not much anybody...
...barged through Reomel Ramones' front door Monday and started seizing computer equipment (but no computer, which was apparently disposed of while police tried to find a statute to prosecute on and a judge tech-savvy enough to issue a warrant), most offices and government agencies ravaged by the Love Bug last week had put their digital lives back together and passed out software patches to plug this Herbie's favorite holes. But no matter what their IT guys tell them, says Grossman, "virus writers will always be able to find a way around whatever walls and patches the anti-virus...