ILOVEYOU
Forty-five million machines in a day, and no law to charge anyone under
In May 2000 a message with the subject line ILOVEYOU and an attachment named LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs spread worldwide. Windows hid the .vbs extension by default, so the attachment appeared to be a text file. Opening it overwrote files and mailed itself to every address in the victim's Outlook contacts.
It reached an estimated forty-five million machines inside a day. The author, Onel de Guzman, was a student in Manila. Charges were dropped: the Philippines had no law at the time under which writing malicious code was an offence.
A usability decision — hiding file extensions — became a global security failure. It also forced the point that computer crime law was national while the impact was not.
The Hacker Chronicles
Volume Two — Going Pro
This page is the summary. The chapter — ‘ILOVEYOU’ — follows the case properly: what was known at the time, who decided what, and how it actually unfolded rather than how it was later retold.
Two more volumes this year.
Going Geopolitical in October, Going Strategic in December.
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