Top 10 Deadliest Computer Viruses of All Time

By Joseph Reis – Owner of fbx.ee – fbx.ee.com

As the world has progressed a lot the computers have played a vital and key role in this progress. The whole world is now a global village and the credit goes to computers. Man has accessed other planets and of course this credit too goes to computers. But, as the computers have advanced the problems to the security have also increased. There are obviously increased security concerns than the previous days computers. Viruses are one of  the top problems which the computer world is facing nowadays. Many users have faced a simple or worst computer virus. Deadliest computer viruses have made the computer world at stake. Destructive cyber viruses have increased privacy and security problems of the internet users.

I LOVE YOU:

Love Bug or Love Letter is another name for it. It is one of the deadliest computer viruses. From destructive cyber viruses which cause a lot of working problems all over the globe, this is a very dangerous virus. It has infected more than ten million personal windows computer users by 4 may 2000. I Love You started as an email message with the title I love you and an attachment named  “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs“. This virus damaged a huge amount of about 10 billion dollars. It infected 10% of the world’s computers including governmental organizations. Two Filipino programmers Reonel Ramones and Onel de Guzman created it.

Code Red:

Deadliest computer viruses and deadliest cyber viruses cause a lot of damage to personal computer users and also firm organizations. Code Red attacks computers using Microsoft IIS web server. It attacked mainly enterprise networks and caused a major damage to these networks. It is the deadliest computer virus and is able to run on the  entire memory having a 3569 bytes of size. When it enters the computer it will make a hundred copies of it and will eat  a lot of resources of the system. When it affects the system it leaves a message “Hacked by Chinese!“. Deadliest cyber viruses which affect people working with the internet also have the same kind of working.

David L. Smith in 1999 created this deadliest computer virus. It is an infected word document which is posted as alt.sex unset group. It has a list of passwords for nudity and pornographic sites. Deadliest cyber viruses affect internet servers and misuses the data of users for evil purposes. This deadliest computer virus mails itself to the top fifty people in the email address of the user thus causing an increased email traffic. This increased email traffic disrupted the email services of government agencies and other corporations. It also corrupts documents by adding Simpsons reference. David Lee Smith created this virus by using America Online (AOL) account and created the file alt.sex. All these documents contained free passwords to the sites with adult content. It was the fastest infection spreading at that time. This deadliest computer virus almost wasted 80 million dollars all over the world. 

This deadliest computer virus infected computers in 2004 which took the advantage of a buffer overflow in Local Security Authority Subsystem Service. A computer science student Sven Jaschan created this virus in 2004. LSASS controls the security of accounts and crashes the computers. Deadliest cyber viruses including Sasser  spread widely all over the world. Millions of users and agencies like public transportation, airplanes were infected by this virus. Estimated damage this virus caused was about 18 billion dollars. As Jaschen was only 17 years old he was held as a minor. This deadliest computer virus exploits the vulnerable OS through an unsecured port.

Cyber viruses caused a loss of billions of dollars to the bankers. Zeus also called Zbot is a Trojan horse malware package which runs on Microsoft windows. This deadliest computer virus carries out many malicious and criminal tasks. Zeus often steals information related to banks. The most common tool of this virus is man-in-the-browser- keylogging and form grabbing. It infected a number of computers either through drive by downloads or phishing scams. Zeus was first recognized in 2009 when it compromised the security of thousands of multinational corporations and banks. It mainly targeted Amazon, Oracle, Bank of America Cisco etc. It steals the login credentials of social accounts email and bank accounts. Seventy million dollars were stolen using this deadliest computer virus. 100 people were involved in the use of this deadliest cyber virus. 

This deadliest computer virus is also known as Downup or Downadup. It is a virus of windows created by unknown owners in 2008. Conficker name is a mixture of English word configure and German pejorative. It works by using defects in the operating system to create a botnet. This virus infected almost 9 million computers including secret services, government organizations and individual businesses. This deadliest computer virus caused a damage of about 9 billion dollars. This virus exploited an unsecured patch in the windows by using network service vulnerability. After infection the virus will reset account lockout policies and block access to windows update and antivirus sites. It installs a software that makes the computer a botnet slave and slams the money of the user. 

Israeli defense force together with the American government developed this deadliest computer virus. Stuxnet is one the deadliest cyber viruses that ever existed in the world. Cyber-warfare was the purpose of its creation. Israel created this deadliest computer virus to disrupt the nuclear programs of Iran. It ruined almost 10% of the nuclear centrifuges of Iran. The main target of this virus was the nuclear project of Iran. It attacked industrial Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). PLC allows the automation of processes in machinery. USB devices are spreading this virus. 

This deadliest computer virus is a Worm of Windows. It became the fastest spreading email virus since 2000. An unknown person created this virus.. One of the deadliest cyber viruses spreads by appearing as an email error. This virus has an attachment of itself. When it affects the computer it sends emails by itself to the address book of the user. In the first step step it unlocks a door to allow remote access. In the next step it starts a denial of service attack on the SCO group.

This computer virus is a Trojan horse ransomware that attacks Windows. It uses emails to spread itself. When it has infected the computer it will encrypt a number of files on the hard drive or any mounted storage. As it was very easy to remove this malware from the computer the only way was to pay a Ransom by deadline. The Ransom almost costs 400 dollars in bitcoin.

This deadliest computer virus is also known as Sapphire was developed in 2003. Deadliest cyber viruses that infected the majority of computers, this virus is at the top that infected 50% of the internet servers only in 15 minutes. It uses a false version of SQL server 2000 of Windows. Since administrators mainly use this server so they were the main target of this deadliest computer virus. It generated a huge amount of network packets. 13000 ATMs of Bank of America were unusable due to this virus. At that time South Korea lost all its internet. 

Rapid development in the internet and computers have made programming easy, affordable and reachable. A slight mistake in patches and security services has caused a loss of millions of dollars by the deadliest computer viruses. Internet service providers and operating system developers should keep their systems uptodate in order to avoid all these damages. Deadliest cyber viruses can be rendered as non functional by improving security patches. It is also the duty of normal users and banking networks to keep their systems uptodate to protect their computer. Security and privacy of users must be the top priority of ISPs. Better and updated antivirus softwares should be used to avoid all these damages.
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