LOVEYOU was a computer virus that hit numerous computers in 2000, when it was sent as an attachment to an email message with the text “ILOVEYOU” in the subject line. The virus arrived in e-mail boxes on May 4, 2000, with the simple subject of “ILOVEYOU” and an attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs”. Upon opening the attachment, the virus sent a copy of itself to everyone in the user’s address list, posing as the user. It also made a number of malicious changes to the user’s system.
Such propagation mechanism (though in IBM mainframe rather than MS Windows environment) had been well known and used already in the Christmas Tree EXEC of 1987, which brought down a large fraction of the world’s mainframes at the time.[citation needed]
Two aspects of the virus made it effective:
* It relied on social engineering to entice users to open the attachment and ensure its continued propagation.
* It exploited the weakness of the email system design that an attached program could be run easily by simply opening the attachment; the underlying mechanism – VBScript – had not been exploited to such a degree previously to direct attention to its potential, thus the necessary layers of protection were not in place yet.
