“Hey, Windows administrators, how are you and your users
doing with that ILOVEYOU mail virus and the spin-off viruses that
seem to be appearing? I couldn’t decide which adaptation of a James
Bond movie title best described the situation. “From Redmond with
Love” seems appropriate here. Or perhaps Linux users might
prefer “Live and Let Die,” as in Long Live Linux while Windows
Systems Die.”
“I got a close look at the ILOVEYOU virus, because I received a
number of messages containing the offending code. The virus appears
in my Linux Mutt client as a text file of the Visual Basic script.
Mutt makes it pretty easy to read through the virus code and see
what it would do if executed on a Windows system.”
“It’s pretty nasty. It looks like the script downloads a
potentially destructive executable file and schedules that
executable to run by changing your registry settings to make your
copy of Windows load and run new programs when it starts up. I’m
not quite sure of the details because I didn’t spend much time
analyzing the code. I don’t have to.”