Since then, many harmless or harmful malware have emerged and disappeared as cybersecurity people learned to cope with them. Nonetheless, a few of these are still the worst computer viruses in the history of computer security. This article tells you about the top 12 devastating computer viruses to hit the digital arena.
Furthermore, these viruses are all ranked according to the extent of financial damages they inflicted on the world. Hence, while they might not look so sophisticated, they undoubtedly proved to be the most successful viruses for cybercriminals. Below we give you the costs, reach, key facts, and other details surrounding each virus.
Nonetheless, this is by no means an extensive list of all digital viruses. Every day, we have about million pieces of malware attacking the digital denizens. So the list is infinite for any practical purposes. Our top twelve are the very worst but are not representative at all. This list merely intends to let you know the most devastating malware that have incurred huge financial damages until now.
The Mydoom outbreak is the worst virus attack ever to happen. Its estimated damage went as high as 38 billion USD which would be As Novarg arrived into a system, it would scan it for fresh addresses. Then it sent copies of itself to those addresses. It also linked the infected computer into a botnet whose purpose was to carry out DDoS Distributed Denial of Servic e attacks. These attacks managed to shut down a website, or a server, by overwhelming it with junk traffic. So that one percent represents thousands of millions of emails.
So even 16 years after it was at the center of the world, Mydoom still has a life of its own, infecting those devices with the worse protection possible and still producing 1. The Mydoom author was a wanted man. A quarter-million USD reward was available for his head, but nobody ever found him. Sobig appeared in as another worm , just like Mydoom.
It reached Europe, the US, and Asia. The authors released several Sobig versions quickly known from Sobig. A to Sobig. The last one was the worst. It disrupted the activities of many businesses worldwide , with the Air Canada ticketing being the most famous problem during its time. Klez appeared even earlie r than the two previous worms in Klez would send fake emails, spoof known senders , and kill other viruses within a system.
Klez came in many flavors, as other viruses and worms often do. During all this time, it kept evolving to release more dangerous iterations. During the s , this dangerous computer virus would arrive in your inbox disguised as a love letter. But, then, it seemed to be nothing but a plain text file. Iloveyou aka Loveletter hit the internet on May 4th. And it must have found the force within it because it reached 10 million computers very quickly.
The author was Onel e Guzman, a college student from the Phlippines. However, it seems that he never intended for his work to spread so much or to do so much damage. The WanaCry is the first ransomware on our list. It takes over your computer or cloud files , encrypts them to make them unavailable to you. Then it asks for you to pay a ransom hence, the name to receive the decryptor to unlock your data. WanaCry arrived at the computers of countries in a single day.
It hit all kinds of organization s hospitals, governmental offices, private businesses , causing massive disruption. Fortunately, Marcus Hutchins , a year-old security expert in the UK, eventually found a way to neutralize WannaCry. The WannaCry episode illustrated how the most outdated operating systems are vulnerable to attacks. That is why updating your system is a standard security practice. Continue Reading. You may also like Related Topics: anti virus software , featured.
More in Technology News. The WHO estimates that worldwide, there are more than 25 million outpatient visits and two million hospitalizations each year due to rotavirus infections. Countries that have introduced the vaccine have reported sharp declines in rotavirus hospitalizations and deaths. The virus likely emerged in bats initially, then hopped into nocturnal mammals called civets before finally infecting humans, according to the Journal of Virology. After triggering an outbreak in China, SARS spread to 26 countries around the world, infecting more than people and killing more than over the course of several months, according to History.
The disease causes fever, chills and body aches, and often progresses to pneumonia, a severe condition in which the lungs become inflamed and fill with pus. SARS has an estimated mortality rate of 9. The virus may have originated in bats and passed through an intermediate animal before infecting people, according to Nature. The initial outbreak prompted an extensive quarantine of Wuhan and nearby cities, restrictions on travel to and from affected countries and a worldwide effort to develop diagnostics, treatments and vaccines.
Since its appearance, the virus has caused over five million deaths worldwide, according to Reuters. Common symptoms include fever, cough, loss of taste or smell and shortness of breath and more serious symptoms include breathing difficulties, chest pain and loss of mobility. On Aug. In December , this vaccine became the first to be approved after a large clinical trial, according to Nature. According to WHO , the disease infected camels before passing into humans and can trigger a fever, coughing and shortness of breath in infected people.
There is no vaccine available to prevent this disease, according to the NHS. The best way to reduce the chances of infection is to wash hands regularly, avoid contact with camels and not consume products containing raw animal milk.
Live Science. See all comments Don't said:. Meh said:. Comment on rabies fatality rate. Although all warm-blooded animals are thought to be susceptible to rabies, there are strains of the rabies virus multiple bat stains strains are maintained in particular reservoir host s , with some cross over especially in the US between raccoons and skunks. Although a strain can cause rabies in other species, the virus usually dies out during serial passage in species to which it is not adapted, and non-carnivores cows, horses, deer, groundhogs, beavers AND CATS, like small rodents, are dead-end hosts.
These PLCs are controlled by computers and it is the main target of the Stuxnet worm. It was reported that the worm already infected more than 50, Window computers and Siemens has reported 14 infected control systems which were mainly in Germany. MyDoom, the first version of the worm, appeared on January 26, It spread via email and through a peer-to-peer network. On Feb 1, , it caused the virus to begin a denial of service DoS attack and on Feb 12, it stopped distributing itself. Even after the virus spread, the backdoors created during the initial infections remained active.
Sasser and Netsky were created by a 17 years old German named Sven Jaschan. These two worms behave in different ways, similarities in the code led security experts to believe they both were the work from the same person.
The Sasser worm is unstoppable; once the virus infected a computer, it looked for another vulnerable system. The virus scans random IP addresses to find potential victims. The virus slows down the Internet and puts some sites to a complete halt. Sasser was so effective it actually ground one third of the post offices in Taiwan to a halt, shut down branches of a Finnish bank, and forced rail and transatlantic flights to be cancelled.
On the other hand, Netsky virus spreads via e-mail and Window networks with the purpose of insulting other computer viruses such as Mydoom and Bagel. There are many forms of Netsky, each made by different people. Netsky was actually the more viral virus, and caused a huge amount of problems in
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