ILOVEYOU Worm - Excercises

Pre-reading excercises

1. What attacks have you heard about?
2. Have you ever had a virus or worm in mail?
3. Name a few of the most famous viruses.
   • Melissa
   • Love Bug
   • Code Red
   • Bugbear
   • Blaster

Comprehension questions

1. What kind of attachment was in the ILOVEYOU worm?
   • It was a visual basic script.
2. In what language was the ILOVEYOU worm written?
   • VBScript programming language
3. When was the ILOVEYOU worm detected?
   • 4th May, 2000
4. Who created the Barok trojan?
   • Onel de Guzman, a Filipino student
5. What action did the Pentagon take in order to protect itself from the ‘I Love You’ virus?
   • The Pentagon had to shut down its e-mail system.

Further exercises

1. Match headings to paragraphs.
2. There are several different variants of emails with this virus in the article. Write your own variant of email that will encourage people to open the attachment.

Possible topics for discussion

1. Why was this virus so dangerous and harmful?
   • The worm overwrote important files, as well as music, multimedia and more, with a copy of itself. It also sent the worm to everyone on a user’s contact list.
2. Why did it attack only Windows Operating Systems?
   • Bad security policy, holes in the security mechanism system and a lot of users oblivious of danger - these factors have added to the success of the virus.
3. What legal consequences should be faced by the authors of computer viruses?
   • high fines
   • ban on access to computers
4. What action can each computer user take to protect their computers against computer worms?
   • install anti-virus software
   • be careful what e-mail attachment you open, what websites you visit
   • check the source of any software you install
   • check data media before you open them, especially pen drives

Possible difficulties

To help you understand certain parts of the text, make sure you know the meaning of the keywords before you start reading.