A few days ago, the British journalist and cybersecurity expert, Geoff White, author of Crime Dot Com, speaking with Arturo Di Corinto for Italian Tech, he asked him: “Why did the I Love You trojan infect 45 million computers in the world? What else can make you click on an infected attachment but a love letter? ”.
Era on May 4, 2000. And the infected computers in the world were 55 million, with damages of several billion dollars. He was a university student from the Philippines, in Manila, who created this virus it sent itself by e-mail to the entire Outlook address book of the user it had infected. Obviously the infection started from Asia, but the following day it had already touched the whole world. The criminal email came with an attachment that read LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs with an object that was hard to resist: I Love You. Apparently 3 million people, Windows users, actually didn’t resist and clicked: “The virus is spreading at incredible speed,” Mikko Hypponen immediately warnedwho later became a famous computer virus hunter.
The I Love You virus didn’t just infect your computer and send itself to all contacts: it also blocked audio and video files and identified all passwords, sending them to the Philippines. Receiving them was the creator of the virus, the 23-year-old computer science student Onel de Guzman. The police took very little time to locate it, but then it turned out that in the Philippines sending a computer virus was not prohibited by law, there was simply no regulation to deal with it. And in any case in de Guzman’s time he denied everything. It was Geoff White, years later, who tracked him down for the book he was writing and be told the truth: de Guzman told him he wanted to steal passwords just to be able to access the Internet for free.