Melissa was a new virus for a new age: the email age. Forget
floppies, this one was among the first to spread via the dreaded email
attachment.
It also pioneered the art of breaking
into your address book and sending itself to all your contacts. The
virus would arrive via an innocent-looking email that told you to open a
document… and why would you open a document from a stranger? You
wouldn't.
Remember the whole address book
thing? So, when you got an email from, say, your boss, telling you "Here
is that document you asked for," there's a pretty good chance you might
open it. Whoops.
Hacker David Smith claimed he wrote
the virus for a stripper named Melissa who he had met in Florida. Right,
because everyone knows girls are suckers for a destructive bit of code.
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