It’s ten years ago today since the Anna Kournikova worm spread around the world, offering the promise of pictures of the Teutonic tennis temptress but in reality infecting your Windows computer with an email-aware worm.
The Anna Kournikova worm wasn’t particularly sophisticated in design. It was a regular email worm written in Visual Basic Script (VBS), which forwarded itself via emails using details it harvested from your Microsoft Outlook address book.
The worm, which Sophos called VBS/SST-A (it was the media which dubbed it “Anna Kournikova”), didn’t even involve any blood, sweat and tears for its Dutch creator, 20-year-old Jan de Wit. He simply downloaded from the internet a virus construction kit called VBSWG which generated his malware for him.
The real genius of the Anna Kournikova worm was not in its coding. It was in its social engineering.
Here’s what an infected by the Anna Kournikova worm…
Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.
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