You probably don’t need too great a memory to remember the Melissa virus.
It was one of the very first email-aware viruses, striking the internet hard in 1999 by forwarding itself in an infected Word document to the first 50 people in your Outlook address book.
It was the grandaddy of some of the big viruses that followed, paving the way for other significant email worms like the Love Bug, Anna Kournikova and MyDoom.
But what many people don’t remember is that David L Smith, the author of Melissa, named his virus after an exotic dancer he encountered in Miami, Florida. And guess what? Melissa is back!
No, not the Word macro…
Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.
Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter or Mastodon to read more of the exclusive content we post.
