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Cast your minds back to the year 2000, the post-internet, pre-facebook age as people started using email on a daily basis. They get a message from an acquaintance with the subject “ILOVEYOU” and an attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs”.
Flattered, people inevitably opened the attachment: it went downhill from there. The worm replicated itself into the user’s system, making malicious changes and sending itself to the user’s contact list. And so on. At the time, a total of 10% of all computers connected to the internet were infected.
My first thought during the ILOVEYOU virus, was, how stupid, arrogant, or blatantly desperate do you have to be to open these attachments in the first place? Surely, the body of the text: “kindly check the attached LOVE LETTER coming from me,” ought to have been a red flag?
I have newly-acquired respect for virus-designers though, since it turns out that despite my own paranoid precautions in dealing with internet, despite my daily virus scans and updates, despite my perpetual suspicion of hoaxes and worms, I am just as stupid and self-centred as people back in 2000.
More so, since I should know better.
My ego and curiosity got the better of me this summer when I received an odd facebook post from someone. Complete with my name and chat-speak (“Hey Marie is tht really u?”) the wall post was strangely believable. Seeing the link came from Google (or did it?) I felt myself clicking the link.. Alarm bells are ringing all over in my head as a dialogue box asks me if I wish to download it.
But my ego wins yet again.
In this world where image is king, where we spend hours facebook-stalking ourselves to create an virtual image of who we are, I must see what picture this is. Have snaps of my holiday romance with Johnny Depp finally hit the net? I resolve to open without saving, but the option isn’t included. (Alarm bells ringing with insistence). I download it. But just to be on the “safe side” (right) I run it through my anti-virus, which (wrongly) claims it to be safe. So I open it, but it’s taking longer than it should. So I shrink away in fear—delete the programme, clear it from the wastebasket, update Norton and run a full system scan. I google “facebook virus picture_dl.exe” only to face my own mortification.
It’s a nasty nasty worm. Damn. I rack my brain to find synonyms of “stupid.” “Bloody idiot,” “moron” and “complete and utter fool” come to mind.
I must see what picture this is. Have snaps of my holiday romance with Johnny Depp finally hit the net?
I frantically search (in and out of safe mode) for the infected file on my hard drive, in case it had time to replicate in the bosom of my beloved PC. (Why didn’t I just get a Mac?) Just then, my mother comes in, armed with her best you-are-a-disappointment-face, stating, in her best matter-of-fact-voice, that I should have known better, that I should never download attachments, that I am a moro and that it was pretty stupid of me as my passwords are saved by my web browser. After thanking her for her edifying speech, and by thank I mean, use my best am-still-a-teenager-leave-me-alone-voice, I proceed to panic some more.
Having run a million diagnostics, liveupdates, searched heavens and earth for the files named “Splm” within “System 32” that would have been created or modified that day, I am semi-satisfied to find nothing at all. But mostly I feel stupid
But it’s a stroke of genius really.
The weakest link in many a chain is man himself; and in appealing to our egos, virus-designers have found the perfect target. We open the attachments because we think it might be true, but having fallen for something so blatantly obvious, we fail to advertise our stupidity for fear of embarrassment. It’s a bit like an STD, really: no one goes around boasting they caught Chlamydia, do they?
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