techweb.com — Computer viruses are like real-life viruses: When they're flying around infecting every PC (or person) in sight, they're scary. But after the fact...well, they're rather interesting, albeit in a gory kind of way. With this in mind, we shamelessly present, in chronological order, the 10 most destructive viruses of all time.
Jul 5, 2006 View in Crawl 4
mrunderbridgeJul 5, 2006
Yeah, doing the list by damage caused in dollars skews it to recent results. Kind of ranking earthquakes that way, the SF quake of 06 wouldn't even crack the top 10 but it was easily the worst quake to hit the US. They should have normalized it to something like the total number of PCs. It would have been more interesting to see comparisons between something like Form and SoBig. All the ones on the list, they're too fresh in our memories (and they were all pretty similar as far as distribution method). Not as cool.
killerxJul 5, 2006
Microsoft Windows is THE Virus!
kazrogJul 5, 2006
Mac OS X and Linux are simply more secure platforms. Yes, virii are always a possible threat, but nowhere is the threat more imminent and destructive than with Windows. The are plenty of talented, motivated hackers out there trying to write viruses, worms, trojans, etc. for Mac OS X and Linux, and none of them have ever succeeded. OS X and Linux are far from "obscure" and have a much larger market share than BeOS/Zeta, etc. When you look at the installed user base of OS X and Linux in terms of machines connected to the internet, the market share approaches the 15% range, which is far from obscure.
dbeachleJul 5, 2006
... or the last 20 years, whichever is longer.
germanopinionJul 6, 2006
What i found interesting about this article is that the biggest "virus" is not even mentioned.The overall downtime, the number of "infected" PCs and the financial loss created by it is so outstandingly high that this list looks like nothing.This "Virus" is called Microsoft Operating System! Just do some math about their market share and the "normal" not by extra malicious software caused downtime of their Operating Systems.(And no, I'm not an "Anti-MS Fan boy". In fact I'm also using it beside a newly Ubuntu Installation now)
llanowarJul 6, 2006
Notice how it says "the 10 most destructive", and NOT "the top 10 most destructive"So not any of them is #1
g00chJul 6, 2006
Oh man, I remember CIH...I was doing network administration at my highschool when it hit (this was back in 99 youngins). I remember having to scan every system on the network during the 2 days before the virus activated itself. Even then, it still managed to find its way back into the network and we ended up losing at least 25 systems (on a network of about 150). Mmm... MBR wiped and if the BIOS was flashable, you had a motherboard sized paperweight. Thankfully most of the systems we were using were carbon copies of one another and we brought a few back to life with either a quick replacement of the board from one of the junked units we had lying around, or if that was toast, its bios chip.I'm pretty sure that a friend of mine at the time who had a habit of downloading warez and then bringing them to school had a large hand in the spreading of that damn thing.I'll say one good thing for CIH though, afterwards all the computers were kept regularly updated with antivirus defs.
mookiexlJul 8, 2006
99%
johnnysoftwareFeb 5, 2010
Well, if their browser/OS/plugins/anti-virus were fully patched up and their OS/browser vendor was saying the programs were safe, then it was not the user that was not thinking.
johnnysoftwareFeb 5, 2010
Wrong. Worm spreads completely automatically. Virus requires some slight human action to install itself. Morris worm spread automatically. However, VB scripts you actually have to run Outlook and look at an email message to get infected. If all you do is look at the message, not open the attachment - and you still get infected, then it is a virus and that does happen with a bunch of them. If you do not run Outlook, then it is not infecting your computer at all.
johnnysoftwareFeb 5, 2010
So will levitation and perpetual motion.Conflating market share to actual virus infection rate is stupid. Hackers do not exploit market share. They exploit vulnerabilities. If the OS has lots of low-hanging fruit in that area and there is a large, greedy, and reasonably fearless criminal community then the OS is going to get hacked.There is a large, very greedy criminal community and Windows is an orchard. No one is arguing that there are not exploitable bugs in other operating systems but Windows is getting hit hard. Microsoft has pocketed a lot of money creating their "market share disadvantage". Now, spending a good chunk of money on finding/solving the problems is long overdue.The flaws that are getting exploited the most devastatingly are the ones found by outside researchers, over and over again. Tells you something is out of whack. Because what that means is that at LEAST to hackers are finding a flaw and doing something with it faster than Microsoft can notice the bug and come up with a fix.It has billions of bucks in the bank as a resource to draw on. The hacker duos out there do not. Clearly, there are grounds for cognitive dissonance.
johnnysoftwareFeb 5, 2010
Maybe Apple should hold a sale on Macs and iPads after weeks where mega-outbreaks strike Windows. Then, the victims would wind up saving some money that month.I have seen people replace their whole Windows PC with a brand new one and get infected again a year or so later. As you would completely expect, of course. They are not varying anything, and everybody realizes now it is not the user's error or lack of updating that causes the problem, it's the vendor's responsibility frequently these days because the user was on the ball.
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