HOMENATION
INDICATORS
Tax Dollars, Child Heath,
Internet Use and More
CAMPAIGN 2000
Pump Up the Volume
Who Gets the 'A'
in Education?
What They Think of
Each Other
WORKSHEET:
The Big Issues:
A Summary
CIVIL RIGHTS
The Ghosts of Alabama
SOCIETY
Aye, Aye, Ma'am
SCIENCE
The Race Is Over
BUSINESS
Grounds For Appeal
WORLD
GLOBAL ECONOMY
The New Radicals
MIDDLE EAST
Arafat's Long Journey
After the Lion
RUSSIA
The Acid-Bath Solution
WORKSHEET:
The Role of the President:
A Comparison
ASIA
The Remaking of
a Dictator
Taiwan Takes a Stand
AFRICA
When the Peace
Cannot Be Kept
LATIN AMERICA
The Bionic Candidate
Can One Boy
Change Policy?
WORKSHEET:
Deciding Elián's Fate
TECHNOLOGY
Attack of the
Love Bug
Current Events in Review
Answers
TECHNOLOGY
By LEV GROSSMAN
Anne Guepiere works in the Hong Kong office of a large U.S. company that would prefer to remain nameless. At about 4 o’clock last Thursday, she received an e-mail. It seemed harmless enough. The subject line read iloveyou. With it came an attached document labeled love-letter-for-you.txt.vbs. How nice. Just a couple of clicks, and her curiosity would be satisfied.
Too late. “I didn’t even read the ‘iloveyou’ part,” recalls Guepiere, whom history would record as, if not Patient Zero, then surely one of the earliest victims in a global pandemic. “Only when I opened [the attachment] did I realize there was a problem.” Indeed, it was a bigger problem than anybody, probably even its mischievous creator, could have imagined as computers everywhere tumbled like so many dominoes. Once again that scourge of the Internet age—a computer virus—had struck. Silently, lethally, without even a hint of a warning fever, it raced around the world at light speed, clogging communications and bringing both commerce and politics to a halt.
Because of its implicit, fatally attractive message—Oh, just give me a glance, I bear friendly tidings from a loving admirer!—headline writers immediately (and irresistibly) nicknamed it the Love Bug. But there was nothing lovable about it. Before it spent itself—in its first incarnation, it was truly a 24-hour virus—it would affect tens of millions of computers, eventually ring up a toll as high as $10 billion in lost work hours and reopen troubling questions about the safety and security of our vital electronic lifelines. By almost any measure, it was the most damaging virus ever, with at least three times the byte—as more than one punster put it—of Melissa, last year’s electronic femme fatale. This was not so much because of its ingenuity, says Finnish computer-virus hunter Mikko Hypponen, whose team was among the first to capture the bug’s digital DNA, but because of its blinding speed, spreading around the world in a hypersonic two hours (vs. six for Melissa).
Suspicion fell quickly on a possible culprit in the Philippines, in part because the virus’ eight pages of computer code contained a tantalizing word: Barok. A search of virus registries quickly revealed that it was the name of a so-called Trojan horse, a stealthy software program that filches passwords, written by a Filipino hacker last year. Still, the transparency of this clue suggested that the word might have been inserted as a deliberate smoke screen to fool the computer sleuths. By week’s end, the work of investigators was further complicated by the appearance of a number of copycat viruses, created either by others or by the Love Bug’s author.
Like a real Asian influenza, the virus first emerged in Hong Kong. From there it sped westward with the sun, lying silently in wait in corporate e-mail accounts until unsuspecting office denizens punched in, logged on and double-clicked on the file.
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’Oréal 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.”
What last week’s attack teaches us is that if we want to become a connected society, it is not enough to defend our own backyard (i.e., our own PC). We have to clean up the streets and build an Internet in which it is safe for us to stay as intimately linked as we clearly want to be.
Time, May 15, 2000
Questions
1. What damage did the Love Bug virus cause?
2. What lessons does the Love Bug attack offer?