Six Years After Melissa, Mass-Mailed Malware Has Peaked
On March 26, 1999, Melissa, the first virus that spread by mailing copies of itself to addresses it dug out of infected machines, swept the Internet. Six years later, mass-mailed worms have reached their peak, said the researcher who led authorities to the hacker who wrote Melissa.
Jimmy Kuo, a research fellow with McAfee, was in on the first discussions as samples of the still-not-named virus were captured and put under the forensics microscope.
Melissa, which was a Word macro virus — a form rarely seen these days — was most distinguished by its propagation technique, which involved grabbing the first 50 addresses from Microsoft Outlook, then sending itself to those recipients.
Kuo argued that the propagation scheme would quickly spread, and even flood mail servers with a deluge of messages, predictions that were borne out by events but at first resisted by fellow researchers.
“The first discussions were that the virus wouldn’t get very far because it would end up mailing itself, over and over, to essentially the same 50 people within an organization,” said Kuo. “But I made the assertion that that wasn’t true, because mailing lists were typically among that first 50 due to their spelling — like ‘All’ — or other factors.
“This thing is out there and it’s going to get huge,” Kuo remembered telling the McAfee team.