I could not help to muse about the late I LOVE YOU Virus. First I planned it as Journal entry, but it got a bit out of hand... so I turned it into an entry before posting it to my journal... If and when I have time, I might try to give it a better formatting and formulate a bit better.

OK, it's late, but I could not write earlier about it... my belly was aching from all the laughing. I cannot pity the victims of the virus that has received such a coverage lately.

Indeed, when you look at it, the real virus is the lack of discernment and education of the modal computer user: 5 years back, when you set out to write a virus (not that I ever did, but I know enough about computers to imagine some things), you would spend an awful time to write nifty/copmlicated assembler routines that would modify themselves and copy their code into special locations of executable programs. In other words, writing a virus was not given to everyone, and the easiest part of the virus was certainly the subroutines cleaning out your hard drive.

Now all you have to do is start up some macro/scripting language that comes in house with all the functions to read your adress book and send emails... just imagine (and let your mind boggle) writing this in assembler, with self-mofdifying code to make your virus stealthy, small and deadly! You get all the functionality for free (this is not literally, Lacrymo$oft software costs lots of money for what it does) out of some library.

As for the part of the virus responsible to infect your drive and spread itself, the simplicity there is revealing of the immense loopholes left open by user interfaces making the luser believe he is able to use a computer instead of forcing him to go through a learning process before putting at his disposal the power to wreck his PC and to become a threat to network stability. Notice that the attachment either got opened automatically by the mailer program (which is a bad thing: the decision whether you want to spend money/time/processing power/storage place is up to you, and should not be left over to the computer. Just imagine what would happen if someone sent you a program that just wipes out the whole content of your hard drive, sent to you as attachment with the name "ThisProgramWillKillAllYourHardWork.exe", you would see it coming, but the computer just decides to run it... point made?) or by the "unsuspecting" luser. I put "unsuspecting" between quotes because there was a hint in the file-name: everyone should be wary of files with two extensions and be knowledgeable enough to realise that the extension defines the way the computer interprets the file. The "double-click" is especially insidious, because actually it does not mean "open the file to look at it", but "do whatever you think I want you to do with this file" to the computer. When a luser double-clicks a file, since he does not really know what he is doing, can the computer really be blamed if the result is not the expected one (since there is no precise expectation)?

As for the infected files, once again, if the user interface was a little bit terser, the infection would not work: e.g. the virus would delete "WackyPicture.jpg" and write a new file called "WackyPicture.jpg.vbs" filled with viral code. That's quite a difference, isn't it, compared to the virii mentioned above that had to know the structure of executable files and patch themselves into these files at the right place to be infectious at all! I mean, if a luser is stupid enough not to notice the difference between a file with a "jpg" extension and a file with a "vbs" extension, he simply deserves it to be plagued with a virus. If he is more stupid still to double-click on the filename in the Exploder window anyway, he is really asking for trouble and gets it (remember the BOFH saying with the PFY completing "the meek shall be given what they bloody well deserve and be content with it").

Back in the good old time, when you had to type every filename completely with your hands, the computer would have told you "WackyPicture.jpg" does not exist or something to that effect, and you would have been warned that something was fishy!
I started out as DOS user, and I still use the command prompt (UNIX, too) on a regular basis... now I also use Windows, but I had to learn enough about computers to have some idea what is happening when I ask my computer to do something. This knowledge proves invaluable when working with a computer to avoid mishaps (I didn't have any I-Love-You virus problems).

As last point, instead of sueing the programmers of the virus, they should be thanked by the whole community for demonstrating with a more or less harmless gag the dangers of our dependence to devices we do not all understand. Because, let's face it, I think that most of the jpg's and mp3's are illegal copies... so erasing them from the hard drives cannot be so bad, can it? Doesn't it strike you as odd that reports have it that only Lacrymo$oft Outlook (OutPlouc in French) users have been affected? This incident shows that their software is a wide open door/invitation for truly malevolent people.