The ILOVEYOU Virus

On May 4, 2000, starting in Hong Kong as the workday began there and radiating westward through the world's email servers, a VBScript worm began disguising itself as a romantic love letter. The subject line read "ILOVEYOU," the attachment was named "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs," and it worked because Windows hid the true .vbs extension by default, so it looked like a harmless text file — and because it arrived from someone you knew, pulled from your Outlook address book, the worm's first and most devastating vector. Once opened, the worm mailed itself to every contact in the victim's Outlook address book and could also spread over Internet Relay Chat, then set about overwriting files — images, music, scripts — with copies of its own code.

The scale was staggering. Within ten days, tens of millions of infections were reported worldwide, and an estimated 10% of the world's internet-connected computers were eventually affected. The UK House of Commons shut down its email for two hours to contain the outbreak; most US federal agencies were hit, and the Veterans Health Administration alone received seven million copies of the message. Later estimates put the total damage around US$10 billion in downtime, cleanup, and lost data.

The investigation traced the worm to Manila and Onel de Guzman, a dropout from AMA Computer College. Philippine prosecutors dropped all charges — the country simply had no law against what he had done. (President Estrada signed an e-commerce law that June, but it could not be applied retroactively.) De Guzman then vanished into obscurity, his exact role left ambiguous in media accounts, until 2019, when investigative journalist Geoff White found him running a phone-repair stall in Manila; he admitted he had written and released the worm, clearing others long suspected of co-authoring it. It happened in the dial-up, chain-email, AOL-disc era when everyone opened everything — but the Love Bug itself rode Outlook and Windows scripting, and it permanently rewired how the world treats an unexpected attachment.