ILOVEYOU - GRADE 9

Performance Task#1
ILOVEYOU
Please read carefully.

​ILOVEYOU

ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as Love Bug or Love Letter for you, is a computer malware that infected over ten million Windows personal computers on and after 4 May 2000.

ILOVEYOU was created by Onel de Guzman, a college student in AMA Computer College, Philippines, who was 24 years old at the time. For his graduation thesis in computer science, de Guzman, wrote a program that would enable the average Filipino to get free Internet access. His school rejected his thesis because of its outlaw nature, so he could not graduate.

De Guzman, who is a son of a fisherman and was poor and struggling to pay for Internet access at the time, created computer malware intending to steal other users' passwords, which he could use to log in to their Internet accounts without needing to pay for the service. He justified his actions on his belief that Internet access is a human right and that he was not actually stealing. Not that de Guzman regarded this as stealing: He argued that the password holder would get no less access because of having their password unknowingly “shared.”

ILOVEYOU was unleashed on May 4, 2000. It was simple, but devastatingly effective and highly contagious. It arrived in people's inboxes with the subject 'ILOVEYOU' and a message containing a Visual Basic script file that would automatically upload the virus to anyone who clicked on it.

“Kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me” the message said.

The virus would overwrite random files and send a copy of itself to every other address in a person's email address book, which helped it spread so quickly.

"I figured out that many people want a boyfriend, they want each other, they want love, so I called it that," de Guzman said.

Faced with such a tempting message, many people took the bait, opened the attachment, and got infected. It didn’t take long for the virus to spread around the world. When you think about the math, its success becomes easy to understand, and quite frightening: If the initial victim had sent it to 50 people, and then each of them infected another 50 people, and so on, it would only take six jumps for the virus to infect everyone in the world (presuming they all had computers).

The outbreak was later estimated to have caused US$5.5–8.7 billion in damage worldwide and estimated to cost US$10–15 billion to remove it. Within ten days, over fifty million infections had been reported, and it is estimated that 10% of Internet-connected computers in the world had been affected. Damage cited was mostly the time and effort spent getting rid of the infection and recovering files from backups. “I didn’t expect it would get to the US and Europe. I was surprised,.” de Guzman said.

The Philippines' National Bureau of Investigation tried to charge him with a number of different felony counts, but De Guzman was never prosecuted because, at that time, the Philippines had no law against computer hacking.

Please carefully read the questions. Answer each question based on your understanding.

Performance Task#1

Open Ended

1.   Who created the ILOVEYOU and what was their motivation for creating it?

Open Ended

2.   Why did Onel de Guzman's school reject his graduation thesis?

Open Ended

3. 3.   How did the ILOVEYOU spread so quickly and affect so many computers?

Open Ended

4. 4.   What was the impact of the ILOVEYOU on the world and how much damage did it cause?

Open Ended

5. 5.   Why was Onel de Guzman not prosecuted for creating the ILOVEYOU?

Open Ended

6.   How did the ILOVEYOU lead to increased awareness of the need for better antivirus and cybersecurity measures?

Open Ended

7. 7.   How did the ILOVEYOU impact the way people think about computer security today?