Viruses, whether virtual or real, have impacted our lives. If the virus is well known, more likely it caused a lot of damage and grief to people around the world. Virtual viruses, like worms and trojans, have been known to corrupt or steal sensitive information from one’s computer. Here is one of the most well known computer viruses in the last century:
Fizzer (2003)
By 2003, many worms were spreading over e-mail, but Fizzer was an entirely new creature. If earlier worms, like Code Red, were about mischief, Fizzer was all about money. While some initially dismissed the seriousness of the worm because it wasn’t as fast moving as Code Red, Fizzer was more insidious. “What makes Fizzer stand out is that it’s the first instance of a worm created for financial gain,” says Roel Schouwenberg, a senior researcher at Kaspersky, an anti-virus company. “Computers infected with Fizzer started sending out pharmacy spam.” In other words, Fizzer didn’t just take over your address book to spread for the sake of spreading, it used your address book to send out the now familiar porn and pills spam. Fizzer was followed by better-known spam-inducing worms, like SoBig, which became threatening enough that Microsoft even offered a $250,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest of its creator.
Fizzer also installs a keylogging program to record every keystroke as well as open a way to access a victim’s computer over Internet Relay Chat, and the virus also regularly connects to a web page to try to download an updated version of itself.
E-mails that should NEVER be opened
Subject: why? Body: The peace Attachment: desktop.scr
Subject: Re: You might not appreciate this… Body: lautlach Attachment: service.scr
Subject: Re: how are you? Body: I sent this program (Sparky) from anonymous places on the net Attachment: Jesse20.exe
Subject: Fwd: Mariss995 Body: There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance. Attachment: Mariss995.exe
Subject: Re: The way I feel – Remy Shand Body: Nein Attachment: Jordan6.pif
Fizzer became so threatening that Microsoft was willing to pay $250,000 to anyone who has information about the creator of the said virus. This virus has really made an impression back in 2003. It even caused problems in the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks, to the point that they really considered taking down the network.
