Love Letter Virus - 10th Anniversary of May 2000 worldwide attacks

I remember fighting this one and working very long hours that week.  However, our company came through fine with minimal impacts.  After CIH and Melissa in 1999, we actively monitored Message Labs top ten viruses constantly to look for new attacks and outbreaks.  Very early during the day of the attacks, I saw an infection spike labeled as "Unknown" which was far higher than any previous incident.  

Some of our users called the Help Desk, based on our Active Security awareness program.  They were getting numerous copies of an unusual email labeled as "I Love You' . We quickly sent out an all employees bulletin for individuals not to click on these attachments, as they were suspect.  I was also receiving numerous copies in my business and personal email accounts as well and knew this had to be a serious attack.

Soon, McAfee and other vendors alerted us that this was a serious worldwide outbreak.   We continued to send out all employee bulletins and applied the protective McAfee DAT file as soon as it become available.  Our company was fortunate as no downtime was experienced and less than 5% of our users were infected. 

This multi-billion dollar attack represented one of the turning points for many users to avoid clicking on attacks.  Also, companies began to invest more heavily in security defense tools.  While massive attacks like this are rare, the more recent Conficker worm attacks represents a good case for proactive monitoring and ensuring patches and technical defenses are up to date.

I Love You On Our 10th Anniversary
http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2010/04/i_love_you_on_our_10th_anniver.php

10 years ago this coming week an important and unpleasant event occurred: The ILOVEYOU virus. It was, at the time, the biggest malware event ever, and inspired a generation of script kiddies and greedy, sociopathic programmers. I asked Dave Perry of Trend Micro, an old pro in the field, about the lessons of the Love Letter.  It hit on May 4th, 2000. Like all e-mail viruses of that age it was right out there in the open: The subject line was "I love you"—a notion appealing to many of us, and sent before we all learned to be skeptical of unsolicited solicitations in e-mail.

More information on the Loveletter virus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveletter

QUOTE: The worm began in the Philippines on 5 May 2000 and spread across the world in one day, moving inexorably on to Hong Kong and then to Europe and the US,[1] causing an estimated $5.5 billion in damage.[2] By 13 May 2000, 50 million infections had been reported.  Most of the damage cited was the labour of getting rid of the worm. The Pentagon, CIA, and the British Parliament had to shut down their mail systems to get rid of it, as did most large corporations.[4]

This particular malware caused widespread damage. The worm overwrote important files - music files, multimedia files, and more - with a copy of itself. It also sent the worm to everyone on a user's contact list. Because it was written in Visual Basic Script and interfaced with the Outlook Windows Address Book, this particular worm only affected computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. While any other computer accessing e-mail could receive an "ILOVEYOU" e-mail, only Microsoft Windows systems would be infected.