Notable hacks, breaches, and cybersecurity history.
Test your knowledge with these top questions!
The ILOVEYOU worm of 2000 spread through which email attachment?
Windows hid known file extensions by default, so the .vbs script looked like a plain text file.
The ILOVEYOU worm was written by a student from which country?
Prosecutors dropped the charges because they did not fit computer hacking, and the Philippine cybercrime law passed that June could not be applied retroactively.
Who released the 1988 internet worm that crashed thousands of computers?
Morris launched the worm through an MIT computer to disguise its origin at Cornell.
Robert Morris has said he released the Morris Worm to measure what?
Morris later said he never meant the worm to spread so widely; courts heard estimates of $200 to $53,000 just to clean up one infected machine.
The 1988 Morris Worm infected roughly what share of the computers then connected to the internet?
Roughly 6,000 machines went down in a single day; the whole internet of 1988 held only about 60,000 computers.
Besides copying itself, the ILOVEYOU worm installed a program designed to steal what?
The hidden companion program, WIN-BUGSFIX.EXE, mailed the passwords it collected back to the worm's author.
The ILOVEYOU worm emailed copies of itself to entire contact lists using which email program?
The 1999 Melissa worm spread the same way through Outlook, but ILOVEYOU reached far more machines within days.
The 1988 Morris Worm attack prompted officials to create a computer emergency team at which school?
That team, called CERT, grew into a global hub that still coordinates responses to internet-wide attacks.
Conficker exploited which Windows component to spread remotely?
Conficker abused a remote-code flaw in Windows' Server service, patched under Microsoft's MS08-067 bulletin.
Melissa's deceptive email mainly urged recipients to do what?
The message pretended to contain a requested document, using curiosity and trust to make the attachment seem safe.