Attack Of The Love Bug

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But worse was yet to come. On the other side of the world, in the offices of the German newspaper Abendblatt in Hamburg, system administrators watched in horror as the virus gobbled up 2,000 digital photographs in their picture archive. In Belgium ATMS were disabled, leaving citizens cashless. In Paris cosmetics maker L'Oreal shut down its e-mail servers, as did businesses throughout the Continent. As much as 70% of the computers in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden were laid low. The companies affected made up a Who's Who of industry and finance, including Ford, Siemens, Silicon Graphics and Fidelity Investments. Even Microsoft, whose software was the Love Bug's special target, got so badly battered that it finally severed outside e-mail links at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters.

Governments, too, felt the pain. In London, Parliament shut down its servers before the Love Bug's assault. "This affectionate greeting," intoned Commons leader Margaret Beckett, "contains a virus which has immobilized the House's internal communication system."

The Yanks didn't do any better. On Capitol Hill, crippled e-mail systems forced an atypical silence in the halls of Congress, as well as some unusual scrambling. Arriving early on a day dominated by the death of John Cardinal O'Connor, New York Congressman Joseph Crowley's press secretary, Josh Straka, logged on to his computer only to unleash the bug. He spent the rest of the day manually faxing press releases. "My stress level was through the roof," he says.

The bug infected 80% of all federal agencies, including both the Defense and State departments, leaving them temporarily out of e-mail contact with their far-flung outposts. Though Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon insisted there were other lines of secure communications available, the virus corrupted no fewer than four classified, internal Defense Department e-mail systems.

At the White House, which only a few days earlier had wrangled with Republicans over whether it intentionally destroyed e-mail messages, spokesman Joe Lockhart claimed it had escaped unscathed. President Clinton, in any case, wouldn't have noticed anything. Unlike his cybernaut Vice President, Al Gore, whose campaign was largely unaffected, Clinton rarely reads his e-mail. Still, before rushing off to a retreat in Pennsylvania with Senate Democrats, he vowed to reporters to keep working to protect the nation's growing dependence on electronic interconnectivity from "disruptive forces." George Bush was less fortunate. At his Dallas headquarters, external e-mail servers were shut down for more than a day, forcing aides to work the phones and fax machines.

In New York City's financial district, the bug hit early risers especially hard. "If I had been here a few minutes later, nothing would have happened," says Vincent Cecolini, an editor for the RIA Group, a publisher of financial books. By the time his company's computer technicians arrived, they found 2,000 corrupted messages in his Out box and spent the rest of the day wrestling with the damage. "I was terrorized," says Cecolini. "My stomach was in knots." Old Westbury, N.Y., businessman Kamal Dandona's experience was even more nightmarish. Organizer of a major Bombay film industry-awards show to be held this month in Uniondale, N.Y., Dandona lost posters, press releases and digital photos of every major Hindi film star--all gobbled up by the virus.