User:Pahunkat/sandbox/ILOVEYOU

ILOVEYOU was distributed through malicious email attachments. The worm was found in emails with the subject "ILOVEYOU" and a message of "Kindly check the attached love letter from me!" The attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs" contained the ILOVEYOU worm.

The email format is considered to be one of the first examples of malware using social engineering, by encouraging victims to open the attached file under the pretext they had a lover who was attempting to contact them. This was exacerbated by the fact that emails appeared to come from close contacts as a result of the worm's use of its previous victim's contact lists. The worm's subsequent success has seen social engineering utilized in many modern–day malware attacks. The attachment exploited a feature of Microsoft Outlook where only one file extension would be displayed. As the file name was parsed from left to right, which would be stopped after the first period of the file name, to victims the attachment would appear to be an inconspicuous .txt file incapable of holding malware. The worm's real .vbs extension was hidden.

De Guzman wrote ILOVEYOU in VBScript.