10 Viruses That Nearly Broke the Internet

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Year: 1988

Infected rate: 10 percent of all computers connected to the nascent Internet

According to the history books, this is the first worm to ever infect public networks—affecting 6,000 major UNIX machines and causing somewhere between $100,000–$10,000,000 in damages. Creator Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell University graduate, admitted the self-replication program was something even he couldn’t control and became the first person ever to be convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Year: March 1999

Infected rate: Over 1 million users

Ushering in the age of the email virus, the bug named after a Florida stripper was disguised as a message with the subject line: "Important Message from [the name of someone].” The email body prompted users to open a document, which then created an Outlook object using VB code that read the first 50 names in each address book and sent each one the same email note. It caused Microsoft to shut down incoming email and the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) to issue a warning about the bug.

Year: 2000

Infected rate: Over 50 million users

What started out in the Philippines soon spread across the globe like wildfire via email—designed to steal Internet access passwords from anyone who downloaded it. The program featured a wide range of attacks such as hiding in hard drive folders and sending itself through Internet Relay Chat clients. Would you believe the creator couldn’t be persecuted due to the fact that the Philippines had no laws against coding malware? That’s just as crazy as the near $10 billion in damages the virus caused.

Year: 2001

Infected rate: 40,000 global servers 

Exploiting a flaw in Microsoft Internet Information Sever, the computer worm was discovered by two eEye Digital Security employees drinking Code Red Mountain Dew at the time. Instead of attacking through an email or file attachment, all it required was an active wireless connection, vandalizing web pages with a text string saying “Hacked by Chinese!” The impact was so huge that the White House web server fell victim to the hack.

Year: 2001

Infected rate: Over 2.2 million PCs and servers

Nimda utilized four different attack methods—email, file transfers, server vulnerabilities, and shared folders—to become the web’s most widespread virus within 22 minutes. The worm slowed down online traffic and triggered a denial-in-service attack. Ironically, it was released a week after the 9/11 attacks and lead many to believe it was some form of Cyber Terror attack. 

Year: 2003

Infected rate: Half of all servers acting as pillars for the Internet

The worm responsible for crashing the Internet in 15 minutes attacked a wide number of vulnerable computer networks: including Bank of America’s ATM service, the Continental Airlines flight system, and Seattle’s 911 dispatchers. This encouraged PC users across the globe to stay up on the latest patches and antivirus software.

Year: 2003

Infected rate: 134 countries in 96 hours

During its time, the worm/hybrid became the fastest growing virus ever. Many saw it appear as an email featuring the response subject lines RE: Approved, Details, My details, and Thank You! Home users noticed their machines “jammed” with up to 6,000 copies of the program, where as several companies had their servers hit with millions. The infection was so huge that email-filtering company MessageLabs claimed to stop over 32,432,730 copies from spreading within a year time span.

Year: 2004

Infected rate: Over 1 million computers

MyDoom superseded the SoBig virus as the fastest-spreading email worm to affect Microsoft Windows. The original version initiated two triggers, one causing the program to send out a DoS attack and the second commanding it to stop spreading. However, the backdoors created from the initial infections stood active on the backend. Experts believe the virus was created to assemble “zombie” networks of machines to distribute spam.

Year: 2009

Infected rate: Millions of computers across 200 countries

Poor consumer and corporate password practices exposed millions of users to the botnet. The program carried out a unique method of breaking administrator passwords, becoming extremely difficult to remove from machines and even copying itself to USB drives to expand distribution. Three years later, the worm went on to infest 7 million Windows computers. 

Year: 2014

Infected rate: Millions of PCs and a billion smartphones

The security bug sent the Internet and mobile community into hysteria after providing hackers access to unencrypted data. They managed to do so by grabbing relatively tiny chunks of info such as usernames, passwords, and other private data channeled through a server. So far it’s infected every major blog, cloud, domain registrar, email, and social network. And while Heartbleed is being progressively contained at the moment, tech experts still recommend changing your passwords on widely-used websites.