Word: melissas
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...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, with at least three times the byte--as more than one punster put it--of Melissa, last year's electronic femme fatale. This was not so much because of its ingenuity, says Finnish computer-virus hunter Mikko Hypponen, whose team was among the first to capture the bug's digital DNA, but because of its blinding speed, spreading around the world in a hypersonic two hours...
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...
When the author or authors of this virus get nabbed (and you can bet they will be; the FBI is eager to show off its newly deployed National Infrastructure Protection squads), chances are they will be young men. David Smith was 31 when he pleaded guilty to distributing the Melissa virus. "Mafiaboy," the Montreal youth charged with disabling CNN.COM in February...
...quiz: what do the names Laroux, Ethan, Marker, Melissa, Chernobyl, Class, Footer, Form, Happy99 and Explore.zip have in common? O.K., pencils down. Score one point if you said they're all horrible little computer viruses. Score two if you guessed they were the Top 10 digital infections of 1999. And award a dozen bonus points if you worked out the most important and terrifying connection: like the Love Bug, every last one e-mailed its way into our PCs using Microsoft software as a carrier...
...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 can do about...