Onel De Guzman: He Brought Microsoft Down On Its Knees, ha!

Over a five-hour period, May 4, 2000, the I LOVE YOU virus spread across Asia, Europe and the United States via e-mail messages titled “ILOVEYOU.” The menace clogged Web servers, overwrote personal files and caused corporate IT managers to shut down e-mail systems.

CNN reported that the virus swept through banks, security firms, and Web companies. McAfee estimated that 60 to 80 percent of its Fortune 100 clients were infected by the virus. They scrambled to produce a patch that will detect the virus.

Onel De Guzman - creator of ILOVEYOU virus

The I Love You virus spread quickly among users of Microsoft Outlook and corporate networks that use the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server because it sends a copy of itself to every e-mail address in a recipient’s Outlook address book. By contrast, the “Melissa” virus, which spread around the globe in 1999, sent itself only to the first 50 people on a victim’s address book.

The alleged authors of the worm were Filipinos. Siblings Irene and Onel de Guzman, Reomel Lamores and Micheal Buenafe.

There are a couple of things about this that are awesome:

1. 5 Hours. 3 continents.

2. Filipino programmers, who were not even programmers by profession, were the authors. They didn’t even study in a school that belong to the top 5 universities in the Philippines.

3. Come to think of it, we discovered a brilliant hacker. Someone CIA will gladly sacrifice ten of its highly ranked combat men for one. Unfortunately, our politicians didn’t see that. What they saw is an opportunity to display their brilliant ability to make a fool of themselves by summoning a man who did not do anything illegal. Now, [i heard] these dudes are out of the country, working for a European country’s government. Our stupidity, their brilliance. Story of our lives.

4. They clearly defined their role in the world. All gazillionaires need an evil, heartless genius that can match their brilliance and facepunch them with a single brilliant move that can make them realize, these poor nobodies – with the power of binary codes – can infiltrate their lives, steal their money, make their life miserable. They can, they just chose not to. These programmers are those poor geniuses.

5. I Love You Virus is the closest thing we ever had to an actual Terminator Skynet or 2001 Space Odyssey HAL. If there is a set of human beings in the world who might ever possibly build a device to control all devices in the world to attack us unless we kneel down in front of them and kiss their assh0h0l3s, they are it.

6. One of them, Onel in particular, actually ADMITTED he was the one who set the virus free but didn’t admit to writing it. He committed a bad@$$ act and admitted it. I am not freakin’ worthy of this god of all awesome human beings! He did it knowing all those balding has-beens in the senate will not be able to do anything because our ever reliable lawmakers didn’t write any law that pertains to any act on the world wide web. $uck3rs.

7. The virus’ concept of networking is so simple. In a world overflowing with vain people who claw clasp every opportunity to boost their ego, why will they not open an email that professes love for them. Sh!th3@ds. It’s actually a timeless trick for tasteless people. Someone makes you feel special, you fall for it. Then it destroy your life.

8. It relied on a flawed Microsoft algorithm for hiding file extensions. Microsoft… flawed… Bill Gates… one of the richest man in the world that employs the brightest in the world… outsmarted… by AMA students. HA!

Iloveyouvirus - 5 continents 3 hours, top that!