Every time you surf the internet do you worry about your virus protection? Do you wonder why virus developers work so hard to make life miserable for so many internet and computer users worldwide? If your computer has been affected by a virus you know how frustrating and disheartening it can get. Viruses, worms and Trojan horses are every computer user and website owner’s worst nightmare. There have been many viruses to hit the internet but some have been worse than others. Here is a look at the worst viruses to hit the internet.

The First Virus

The Creeper is considered to be the first computer virus and while it did not cause much damage it finds mention on our list for being the first of its kind. The Creeper would leave a message, “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” The Reaper was the first anti-virus, a code written to detect and destroy the Creeper. While the earlier viruses deleted files and caused disruption in the hard drive, at least the damage was obvious. The viruses we see today are more harmful as they usually camouflage themselves on the computer and can hack into to crucial personal and financial information without you even realizing the damage being caused on your computer.

Boot sector viruses were especially dangerous as every time a floppy was inserted into the computer it was infected and then the virus spread to the next computer the floppy was used on. This made it easy to spread the virus. With the increase in popularity of the internet and its usage, it became easier to spread viruses.

Viruses and How they Spread

The Klez is a virus that has been around for years and has transformed into many forms. It spreads through e-mails and spoofs e-mail addresses. It uses a person’s address book to send out infected e-mails. To make matters worse developers pretended to offer a solution to control Klez and caused large spread havoc on computers.

The ExploreZip came as an attachment with a spammed mail and once the attachment was opened it used the address book to spam and spread to more people. This virus affected word documents as well as operating systems.

The Storm snuck into computer systems across the globe when people open a file of what they thought was video of Europe flooding in 2007. Later the same virus was used on greeting cards and on news stories.

Meet Melissa, the stripper who was inspiration for her namesake virus that overloaded servers and caused many a corporate IT system to slow down and caused loss of work hours and revenue. Melissa was recognized for its spamming and the fact that it went undetected for quite a while.

Nimda was released in the same week as the 9/11 attacks in the US. The virus had a wide mode of spreading and included e-mails, network shares, websites and even used Internet Information Server vulnerabilities.

Benjamin posed as music and video files and used the Kaaza file share folder to spread. It replicated itself and overloaded the hard drive.

Configure Virus

Towards the end of the 2008 the Conficker virus surfaced and by January 2009 it was estimated that it had affected 9 million computers across the world. Conficker C is also known as the Configure virus. The threat was that on April 1st, all computers affected by the Configure virus would come under the remote control of a master computer. Microsoft even announced a bounty of quarter of a million dollars on the writer of the virus. Online safety scan by Microsoft and regularly updates of patches are recommended against the virus. The impact of the virus is difficult to describe as in many cases users of infected computers may not even realize that the Configure virus has affected their computers.

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