Category: Viruses

This was the first cell phone virus and it appeared in June of 2k4. A network worm dubbed Cabir, it was a proof of concept. It spawned several later variants and spread between mobile phones by using a Symbian operating system distribution file that was modified to masquerade as security…

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In January 2k4 the MyDoom.A virus appeared, spreading quickly and setting records for the number of infections. A potent worm that also left behind a trojan, it is estimated it was found in one of every 12 emails. Millions of infected messages were discovered at the peak of it’s spread,…

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On January 25th, 2003 Slammer made it’s appearance rapidly, spreading to nearly 75,000 machines. Exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s SQL Server and MSDE database, the worm quickly attacked the buffer overflow holes in those products. Thousands of companies and organizations suffered massive downtime because of their reliance on MS SQL and…

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The Sobig-F worm appeared in August of 2003, not long after the Blaster worm. It went down in history as the fastest spreading virus ever. Carrying it’s own internal SMTP engine, it was able to email copies of itself at an explosive rate.

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The Blaster worm appeared in early August of 2003 and promptly infected millions of PCs because of a security flaw in Microsoft’s Windows OS. The hole allowed the worm to download itself to vulnerable systems, which meant it didn’t require any action by the user to infect the machine. It…

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The CERT/CC received reports of new malicious code known as the “W32/Nimda worm” or the “Concept Virus (CV) v.5.” in September, 2001. This new worm appeared to spread by multiple mechanisms. It modifies web documents (e.g., .htm, .html, and .asp files) and certain executable files found on the systems it…

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Code Red is a worm that gained notoriety when it appeared in July, 2001. It quickly spread among vulnerable IIS servers around the world.  It is self-replicating malicious code that exploited a known vulnerability. View the original CERT advisory.

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The “Love Letter” worm is a malicious VBScript program that first appeared May, 2000, which spreads in a variety of ways. As of 5:00 pm EDT(GMT-4) May 8, 2000, the CERT Coordination Center received reports from more than 650 individual sites indicating more than 500,000 individual systems were affected. In…

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The Michelangelo virus was one of the first viruses to capture widespread public attention on such a massive scale. It was capable of destroying the contents of hard drives on the same date as the famous artists’ birthday, March 6th. This turned out to be more hype than fact, and…

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The common story is that two brothers from Pakistan analyzed the boot sector of a floppy disk and developed a method of infecting it with a virus dubbed “Brain” (the origin is generally accepted but not absolutely). Because it spread widely on the popular MS-DOS PC system this is typically…

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