Attack Of The Love Bug

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The major antivirus firms quickly posted antidotes--software to neutralize the bug--on their websites, but they were too late to prevent widespread chaos. Desperate for a cure, victims deluged the sites, making them all but inaccessible. McAfee received requests for help from 10,000 affected companies on the first day of the outbreak alone.

Alerted by their overseas offices, most multinationals escaped the Love Bug's full embrace. Tipped off by colleagues in England and Germany, computer-security personnel at AT&T's operations hub in New Jersey reported for duty by 6 a.m. to block the virus. Within hours, some 100 desktop machines were already infected, and technicians had to ditch more than 2 million infected e-mail messages. By contrast, colleges and universities, strongholds of Linux and Macintosh computer systems rather than the targeted Microsoft Windows, got off comparatively lightly.

The consensus among computer-security experts is that the Love Bug is the biggest virus outbreak in history--"by at least threefold," says ICSA.net's Tippett. Agrees McAfee president and CEO Gene Hodges: "It's clear at this point that this is the most damaging and the most widespread virus outbreak ever." Symantec's Moritz is more cautious, conceding that it is No. 1 in numbers and rate of spread, but for sheer destructiveness he prefers last year's Explore.Zip, an especially vindictive virus designed to destroy Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

The extraordinary efficacy of the Love Bug was caused partly by its timing, striking as it did on a busy weekday morning, but also by its seductiveness. It was a minor masterpiece of what hackers like to call "social engineering"--in other words, manipulating the rubes. Few of the lonely hearts among cubicle dwellers could resist its siren song. (This reporter couldn't--and paid the price in lost files.)

From a technical standpoint, the Love Bug is not radically new. Hijacking your e-mail address, for example, has been done--most notably by Melissa. The difference this time was a mix of shrewdness and ruthlessness. While Melissa sent out its tainted e-mails one by one, sometimes overloading the very server that was supposed to distribute them, the Love Bug spewed them as a single batch--and it didn't stop at the first 50 names.

And if you happened to enter a computer chat room--looking for kindred spirits in cyberland--it passed copies of itself as well to everybody out there. (Imagine how receptive patrons of a singles chat room would be to a poisoned "love letter.") Nor would you have been protected if your computer was part of a so-called local area network, or lan. The Love Bug would leap that barrier like some hyperactive flea. And there's more. If you were surfing with Internet Explorer, it would reset your home page to a website in the Philippines, from which it would download a second virus--this one designed to round up all those treasured passwords on your hard drive and ship them off to an e-mail address, also in the Philippines. Fortunately, that contaminated site was shut down early Thursday morning once virus hunters spotted it.