The Most Powerful Viruses

Viruses. They affect not only humans, but also computers in the forms of worms, trojans, and malware. They come from visiting shady websites, downloading files, or from a compromise in the network. There have been millions of these viruses written, however, this is the list of the top three viruses to ever hit the mainstream, starting least powerful to most powerful and effective as number

3. MyDoom
Based on the name, it is already implies that this virus brings doom to its victims when this virus unleashed itself in February of 2004. According to British security firm MessageLabs, 1 in 12 emails handed by the firm was infected with the MyDoom worm. It was the fastest spreading worm, with about 100,000 instances of the worm being intercepted by the security firm, and a quarter million dollar reward for information to arrest and convict the coder was made by MessageLabs. Ironically enough, MyDoom shutdown MessageLab’s servers for several days through a massive DDOS attacks, and even sent Google into a dead crawl for a whole day on July 24, 2004! The author of MyDoom was never ascertained; however, several security firms believe it originated from a programmer based in Russia.

2. Sasser
In the Spring of 2004 a worm by the name of Sasser began its havoc. Once on an infected computer, it would spread via a Windows XP or 2000 bug that would allow it to jump on any computer also on the same internet connection. Once infected, the worm would make shutting down the PC impossible without unplugging it from the wall, and it would cause many crashes of LSASS.exe, hence the name SASSer, that would make usability almost impossible. A man by the name of Jaschan was eventually caught and found guilty after he had released it on his 18th birthday as a “gift to the world”.

1. Storm Trojan
In the beginning of 2007, the Storm Trojan infected thousands of computers. Unsuspecting users would open emails with subject lines such as:
-230 dead as storm batters Europe
or
-FBI vs Facebook

After opening the attachment, the trojan began implanting a service called wincom32 and passing data to other infected computers. All the infected computers become botnets, networks of infected computers, and each machine added to the chaos, like a virus spreading cell to cell in a human body, amplifying the reach and strength.
In September 2007, the botnet grew from thousands to millions of computers. Peter Gutmann estimated somewhere between 1 and 10 million computers were under the rule of the trojan.


I guess the morale of the story is, even if you trust the sender, you shouldn't be so quick to open an attachment, as malware can send itself through contact lists of its infectees. Keeping your antivirus software updated, scheduling regular scans and downloading attachments with a scrupulous, critical eye will keep most malware threats at bay.

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