12 Bizarre Computer Viruses
- 7 years ago
Computer viruses arent a joke, they can cost people and companies millions of dollars. Here are 12 of the most vicious computer viruses ever created. \r
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5 - The Klez Virus - The Klez virus, created in 2001, upped the ante for computer viruses. It originated as a basic worm, doing what most viruses to - infecting a users computer, replicating itself, and then forwarding itself to others in the victims email address book. That was fairly common. However, shortly after it was released, hackers modified the virus to make it more effective. They made it so that the virus could take a name from the victims address book and then place that email address in the “From” field of the email message. This gave rise to the term “spoofing” – where the email appeared to come from a trusted source, when it was really coming from somewhere else. This created a further nuisance for users, as they could no longer block the email address that was sending the spam. \r
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4 - The Code Red Worms - The Code Red worm was released in 2001 and was designed to exploit a vulnerability to those running Windows 2000 and Windows NT. Once infected, the computers would create a buffer overflow, in which the machine would receive more information than it was capable of processing, essentially rendering the machine useless. The virus also initiated a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on the White House, in which computers infected with the virus all tried to cont the White House servers at the same time, overloading the machines. A second version of the worm also created a back door into the users operating system, which would lock out the user and give control of the machine over to the person behind the virus. This meant any of the information on the victims computer could be transferred, or worse yet, the computer could be used as a surrogate to commit crimes. \r
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3 - The Nimda virus - 2001 seemed to be the year of the virus, as another major virus, the Nimda virus, made news. Nimda, which is “admin” spelled backwards, became the fastest spreading virus at that time. As a matter of f, it took only 22 minutes from the release of Nimda for it to make the top of the list of reported attacks on the Internet. The reason it was able to spread so quickly was because its primary target were Internet servers. In f the whole reason behind the virus was to bring Internet traffic to a crawl. It was able to accomplish this by using multiple methods of propagation. It could be transmitted via email, or through system to system links. It also created a backdoor into the victims operating system, allowing the virus author the same access as the user. And if the user was an admin, for which the virus was designed, the author could take complete control of the computer. \r
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2 - SQL Slammer / Sapphire virus - In 2003 a new virus appeared and quickly spread across the Internet. Only a few minutes after infecting its first Internet server, the virus was doubling its number of victims every few seconds. Within 15 minutes it had infected almost half of the major servers that comprise the Internet. It crashed Bank of Americas ATM network, the City of Seattles 911 service, and Continental Airlines electronic ticketing system. By some estimates the virus caused more than $1 billion dollars worth of damage. \r
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1 - Heartbleed virus - The Heartbleed virus was a virus that exploited a vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which was widely used as part of the transport layer protocol of the Internet. It appeared in new, but wasnt made public until new. A fix was announced on the same day it went public. At the time it was disclosed, about 17%, or 500,000, of the Internets secure web servers were vulnerable to an attack, which would allow the servers private keys, cookies, and passwords to be compromised. Some called Heartbleed “the worst vulnerability ever found on the Internet”. The Canada Revenue Agency reported the theft of over 900 taxpayer social insurance numbers due to the vulnerability. Community Health Systems, the second largest US hospital chain also reported that 4.5 million patient records had been compromised.
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Subscribe for weekly wacky videos and learn interesting fs about the world with awesome top 10 lists and other amazing videos.\r
\r
5 - The Klez Virus - The Klez virus, created in 2001, upped the ante for computer viruses. It originated as a basic worm, doing what most viruses to - infecting a users computer, replicating itself, and then forwarding itself to others in the victims email address book. That was fairly common. However, shortly after it was released, hackers modified the virus to make it more effective. They made it so that the virus could take a name from the victims address book and then place that email address in the “From” field of the email message. This gave rise to the term “spoofing” – where the email appeared to come from a trusted source, when it was really coming from somewhere else. This created a further nuisance for users, as they could no longer block the email address that was sending the spam. \r
\r
4 - The Code Red Worms - The Code Red worm was released in 2001 and was designed to exploit a vulnerability to those running Windows 2000 and Windows NT. Once infected, the computers would create a buffer overflow, in which the machine would receive more information than it was capable of processing, essentially rendering the machine useless. The virus also initiated a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on the White House, in which computers infected with the virus all tried to cont the White House servers at the same time, overloading the machines. A second version of the worm also created a back door into the users operating system, which would lock out the user and give control of the machine over to the person behind the virus. This meant any of the information on the victims computer could be transferred, or worse yet, the computer could be used as a surrogate to commit crimes. \r
\r
3 - The Nimda virus - 2001 seemed to be the year of the virus, as another major virus, the Nimda virus, made news. Nimda, which is “admin” spelled backwards, became the fastest spreading virus at that time. As a matter of f, it took only 22 minutes from the release of Nimda for it to make the top of the list of reported attacks on the Internet. The reason it was able to spread so quickly was because its primary target were Internet servers. In f the whole reason behind the virus was to bring Internet traffic to a crawl. It was able to accomplish this by using multiple methods of propagation. It could be transmitted via email, or through system to system links. It also created a backdoor into the victims operating system, allowing the virus author the same access as the user. And if the user was an admin, for which the virus was designed, the author could take complete control of the computer. \r
\r
2 - SQL Slammer / Sapphire virus - In 2003 a new virus appeared and quickly spread across the Internet. Only a few minutes after infecting its first Internet server, the virus was doubling its number of victims every few seconds. Within 15 minutes it had infected almost half of the major servers that comprise the Internet. It crashed Bank of Americas ATM network, the City of Seattles 911 service, and Continental Airlines electronic ticketing system. By some estimates the virus caused more than $1 billion dollars worth of damage. \r
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1 - Heartbleed virus - The Heartbleed virus was a virus that exploited a vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which was widely used as part of the transport layer protocol of the Internet. It appeared in new, but wasnt made public until new. A fix was announced on the same day it went public. At the time it was disclosed, about 17%, or 500,000, of the Internets secure web servers were vulnerable to an attack, which would allow the servers private keys, cookies, and passwords to be compromised. Some called Heartbleed “the worst vulnerability ever found on the Internet”. The Canada Revenue Agency reported the theft of over 900 taxpayer social insurance numbers due to the vulnerability. Community Health Systems, the second largest US hospital chain also reported that 4.5 million patient records had been compromised.