The attachment, which had two periods, could thus display the inner fake "TXT" file extension.
Windows would parse file names from right to left, stopping at the first period character, showing only those elements to the left of this. vbs files) being enabled, and took advantage of a feature in Windows that hid file extensions by default, which malware authors would use as an exploit. On the machine system level, ILOVEYOU relied on the scripting engine system setting (which runs scripting language files such as. De Guzman did not expect this worldwide spread. Originally designing the worm to only work in Manila, he removed this geographic restriction out of curiosity, which allowed the worm to spread worldwide.
He stated that the worm was very easy to create, thanks to a bug in Windows 95 that would run code in email attachments when the user clicked on them. The worm used the same principles that de Guzman had described in his undergraduate thesis at AMA Computer College. He justified his actions on his belief that Internet access is a human right, and that he was not actually stealing. De Guzman, who was poor and struggling to pay for Internet access at the time, created the computer worm intending to steal other users' passwords, which he could use to log in to their Internet accounts without needing to pay for the service. ILOVEYOU was created by Onel De Guzman, a college student in Manila, Philippines, who was 24 years old at the time. The Constitution of the Philippines bans ex post facto laws, however, and as such, de Guzman could not be prosecuted. 8792, otherwise known as the E-Commerce Law, in July 2000, in order to discourage future iterations of such activity. Because there were no laws in the Philippines against creating malware at the time of its creation, the Philippine Congress enacted Republic Act No. The malware was created by Onel de Guzman, a then-24-year-old resident of Manila, Philippines. This made it spread much faster than any other previous email worm. The worm inflicts damage on the local machine, overwriting random types of files (including Office files, image files, and audio files however after overwriting MP3 files the virus hides the file), and sends a copy of itself to all addresses in the Windows Address Book used by Microsoft Outlook. Opening the attachment activates the Visual Basic script. The latter file extension (' vbs', a type of interpreted file), was most often hidden by default on Windows computers of the time (as it is an extension for a file type that is known by Windows), leading unwitting users to think it was a normal text file. ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as Love Bug or Love Letter for you, is a computer worm that infected over ten million Windows personal computers on and after when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and the attachment "".
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