Macro Viruses and the Melissa Virus

Microsoft imagined it was making an act of kindness for its customers by including a programming language to Microsoft Word. From the viewpoint of customer service, this was an excellent thought, since it would permit users the automation and programming in their documents. For instance, upon opening a document, it might be programmed to solicit information from the user that have to be filled in every document, such as phone numbers or insurance policy numbers.

Microsoft did not anticipate this programming language ever being employed for turning Word documents into viruses; however that is precisely what occurred.

The first Macro Virus was dubbed the Concept virus. It was created in 1995 just to demonstrate that it was likely to design a virus in the Macro language of Word. As soon as this was confirmed, however the idea became functional. Until 2004, almost 75% of the entire viruses were macro viruses.

At what time Word runs a document, it opens a standard macros series. At what time the system is corrupted, these standard macros have been substituted, in order that while every prospect documents are opened, their macros are also corrupted. Each document of Word handled by this PC has a copy of the virus, and will corrupt every additional system that runs it.

Probably the most legendary macro virus until today was Melissa. Virus programmer David L. Smith dubbed the code thinking of a known lap dancer, and let it out in late March, 1999. The virus mailed a file dubbed “List.doc” which allegedly contained passwords for 80 adult websites. Anybody who opened the document would obtain the passwords and a gratis duplicate of the Melissa macro virus.

Melissa would after that collect the primary 50 entries in the address book, and send emails by itself to each and every one of them. Melissa had corrupted so numerous systems that until the 26th of March, that it was interrupting mail servers with every one of the corrupted messages wandering all over the Internet.