Melissa anniversary marks birth of email-aware malware Thursday (26 March) marks the 10th anniversary of the notorious Melissa virus, the first successful email-aware virus. The Word macro virus, allegedly named after a lap dancer that creator David L. Smith met in Florida, spread via infected Word documents. Windows users who opened the Word document on unprotected systems became …
Oh, for heaven's sake; it's language like that that portrays people who turn in criminals in a bad light. Leave that kind of language to the wrongdoers, please.
How about "Smith had been persuaded that his best interests lay in helping law enforcement to catch other criminals". Not as catchy, but closer to the truth.
Sodding journos, eh?
O
I worked on a corporate helpdesk at HP when Melissa first hit. Inbound calls to us nearly overwhelmed the Avaya switch - we shared lines with other desks in the facility, but ours had by far the largest user base. The telecom folks reconsidered their 'worst case' allocation plans after that one.
who wrote the WinWord.Concept virus?
That was the first Word Macro virus, and ushered in the huge expansion of viruses into high-level languages, being writen in Word Macros.
It appeared in 1995, shortly after W95 release, and shortly after the AV community had been bombarding Microsoft with calls to make their macro language less easy to write malicious code in. Microsoft ignored all their calls, but shortly afterwards I understand that this 'test' virus was found to be spread all over internal Microsoft offices, and thence into the world.
Everyone assumed that Microsoft had been experimenting, but no one dared say anything....
Re: Cameron Colley's question about Gigabyte, the notorious female virus writer (real name Kim Vanvaeck)
She got arrested in Belgium in 2004 (http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2004/02/va_gigabyte.html ) but ultimately was let off the hook by the cops with little more than a smacked wrist and a promise not to cause trouble again. As far as I know she followed their advice
I know a guy who met Gigabyte, and told me she was a rather cute-looking blonde. Bizarrely I was once invited to a security conference to sing a karaoke duet with her, but probably wisely turned down the opportunity..
And whose stupid idea was it, to make it possible to embed arbitrary code in a Word document? Step forward the real villain of the piece, Microsoft, yet again.
If a doc file were incapable of anything other than causing representations of pages to be generated on screens, printers and equivalent interfaces, we'd have been spared a huge lot of trouble.
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