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'I Love You' Marks Seventh Anniversary
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-05-03
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The Love Letter virus that used a Visual Basic script to infect millions of machines and caused billions in damages in 2000 marked a turning point in virus fighting efforts.
After seven years, 'I Love You' may still make a veteran system administrator cringe. As Wikipedia has chronicled, the Love Letter virus marks its seventh anniversary on May 4th.
A couple of years after its release, Secure Computing's VP of Tech Evangelism, Paul Henry, was in the Philippines, where the virus was written and released to the Internet. Henry said the creator, Onel de Guzman, had been hailed as a national hero for putting the island nation on the technology map.
It wasn't illegal at the time to do what de Guzman did. He broke no laws, and prosecutors declined to charge him with anything. Whether he was more or less to blame than Microsoft's software that allowed the virus to operate and spread depends on who you ask.
"Cybercrime is still a major problem worldwide," Henry said. He cited the lack of legislation and effective enforcement around the globe as issues confronted by virus fighters.
I asked Henry why we haven't had more Love Letters or Sassers hitting the Internet. He attributes it to the shift from mass mailings to more targeted attacks launched by people who create these viruses.
Old threats can be new threats again. Henry noted the rise in Netsky infections being reported, along with more sightings of Bagle worm variants. These are getting new life in a polymorphic form, and slipping by conventional antivirus programs.
Heuristics rather than signature-based approaches are supposed to be the cure. The lag time between signature updates leaves machines unprotected from new threats. Heuristic models are supposed to catch those threats.
The problem comes on the hardware side. Heuristics demand significant processing power, and the typical end user doesn't want to use a bogged-down PC when system resource demands begin to skyrocket.
Henry and I agreed that this fight, much like the battle against spam, needs to be pushed off the desktop and out to the frontier. Ideally that would happen at the ISP level, but Henry believes the lack of financial incentive for ISPs to employ such methods keeps them from being adopted at the gateway.
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Tags: Virus, I Love You, Polymorphic, Computer Security
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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