Which historical malware infection holds the record for the highest infection spread?
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Answer: A. I Love You
Explanation
The I Love You worm utilized clever social engineering via email attachments. It replicated itself rapidly across global enterprise networks by emailing contact lists. Millions of computer systems experienced catastrophic file corruption upon opening the payload. Discovered in May 2000 the malicious script arrived disguised as a love letter. Visual Basic Script files executed automatically when users clicked the attachment link. The infection overwrote vital multimedia and document files across infected systems.
This outbreak forced major corporations to temporarily shut down their email servers. The incident highlighted severe vulnerabilities in default operating system email handling. Cybersecurity education often references this event to demonstrate social engineering risks. Nimda emerged later and targeted web servers rather than mass email contacts. Melissa spread rapidly in 1999 but infected fewer total systems globally. Christmas tree malware affected older mainframe systems rather than modern personal computers.
- Subject
- Computer Science
- Category
- Computer Science
- Topic
- —
- Difficulty
- medium
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