Melissa virus turns 10

A decade ago there was no Facebook, no iPhone, and no Conficker. There was dial-up and AOL and a nasty virus called Melissa that ended up being the fastest spreading virus at the time. A talked to Dmitry Graznov, a senior research architect at McAfee Avert Labs who was among the researchers who worked to fight the Melissa outbreak and track down the creator.

• How was Melissa discovered? Graznov: Avert as a whole discovered it as did some of the competitors. It was submitted to us by customers as it started to spread around the world (on March 26, 1999).
• What made Melissa different from previous viruses? Graznov: It was the first mass-mailing virus, which used e-mail to spread on a large scale.
• What harm did the virus do? Graznov: In some cases the load on the e-mail servers in some organizations was so high that the servers were effectively shut down.
• How many computers were affected and what did the virus do? Graznov: Hundreds of thousands of computers were affected. That's a guess...Melissa infected other documents a user opened in Microsoft Word. It also connected to Outlook if it was running and selected 50 entries in the address book and e-mailed an infected document to those addresses...including mailing lists...As a result, the virus was sent not just to 50 people, but to thousands of people easily. We didn't have any firm numbers to go by, but we did have reports from customers saying their Exchange servers were overwhelmed.
• What was the motivation behind Melissa? Graznov: There was no material gain. Back then, people didn't do it for money. They did it for mischief, for fame...Today there is huge money in computer crime...Back then, we had 200 times fewer pieces of malware than we have today.
• Any comments on Conficker and Melissa and how far we've come? Graznov: Conficker is a completely different type of thing. It's not a macro virus. It's an executable and a botnet, and it downloads lots of stuff on your computer. It's basically a network for sale. It can be rented out. It can be used for password stealing. Back in 1999 there wasn't such a thing as a business model for malware...Today, big money is involved in computer malware. You cannot even compare them.

carefull n beware friends..