The 10 Most Destructive PC Viruses Of All Time
Computer viruses are like real-life viruses: When they’re flying around infecting every PC (or person) in sight, they’re scary. But after the fact…well, they’re rather interesting, albeit in a gory kind of way. With this in mind, we shamelessly present, in chronological order, the 10 most destructive viruses of all time. MyDoom (2004), at its peak slowed global Internet performance by 10 percent and Web load times by up to 50 percent. For a period of a few hours on January 26, 2004, the MyDoom shockwave could be felt around the world as this worm spread at an unprecedented rate across the Internet via e-mail. The worm, also known as Norvarg, spread itself in a particularly devious manner: It transmitted itself as an attachment in what appeared to be an e-mail error message containing the text “Mail Transaction Failed.” Clicking on the attachment spammed the worm to e-mail addresses found in address books. MyDoom also attempted to spread via the shared folders of users’ Kazaa peer-to-peer networking accounts.