“I love you” is one the most dangerous virus of 2017. The brainchildren of the virus are two Filipino programmers namely Onel de Guzman and Reonel Ramones. The virus has significantly been used on social media platforms where it pops up and tells users to click so that they can get information on love matters. Users do not know that the links are viruses. As of 2017, the virus has caused a considerable amount of damage that is estimated to be around $ 10 billion.
The “I love you virus” is a far-reaching menace that does some things. The virus propagates in a big way causing substantial damage on the local and hard drives networks. It also has the potential of changing the home page on Windows Explorer consequently leading to additional software being downloaded to an already infected PC. Additionally, the virus also updates the local registry so that each time a computer is rebooted, the virus will be active so that it can continue with its damaging process (Finn, 2017).
Opening the link with the virus will not result in one’s machine being infected. However, running the Visual Basic Script will lead to a computer being infected. In turn, users who have the Outlook application installed in their machine will spread the virus since the application can access the GroupWise address book via MAPI. Thus, the GroupWise address book indirectly propagates the “I love you” virus (Finn, 2017).
Protection Policies
Both business and government agencies have been crippled by the “I love you virus.” Consequently, organization and government have come up with policies to protect its PCs from being damaged by the virus. One of the policies that have been highly emphasized by both companies and government is the use of computer and social media platforms in organizations. Employees have been made to sign agreements regard the use of social media and computers. A majority of the organizations embrace the agreement in regular personnel policy. However, others create a distinct policy that mainly pertains to computer use (Zohuri & Moghaddam, 2017).
Another policy that has been designed to curb the “I love you” virus is the limiting of the scope of personal use of organizational or governmental computers. According to research, 90 percent of employees spend much of their time browsing the internet for personal reasons and pleasure rather than performing their roles. Moreover, 85 percent of workers admitted using their company’s computers to access social media platforms. Consequently, both the government and corporations have come up with policies limiting the use of office PCs to only work purposes (Zohuri & Moghaddam, 2017).
Moreover, a majority of the companies are highly concerned about inappropriate use of computers by their employees. As a result, some organizations have embraced a policy where top managers monitor how employees use company’s computers, especially regarding matters of the internet. A company may install CCTVs to monitor how its workers use their computers as well as the web. Any employee who will be found using the internet for personal reasons other than an entity’s function will face disciplinary actions based on the organization’s policies (Zohuri & Moghaddam, 2017).
Since the “I love you’ virus is spread through social media, it is important that business organizations take measures to curb employees’ use of their computers for social media endeavors. By making workers to sign an agreement preventing them from using work computers to access social media, the spread of the virus and consequent damage to workplace computers will be halted. Although limiting the use of workplace PCs is a good idea, lack of a monitoring mechanism makes the rule a paper policy. Thus, monitoring how workers use companies’ computers is the best way to prevent the virus from attacking corporation’s computers.
- Finn, E. (2017). What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing. MIT Press.
- Zohuri, B., & Moghaddam, M. (2017). Resilience and Resilience System. In Business Resilience System (BRS): Driven Through Boolean, Fuzzy Logics and Cloud Computation (pp. 1-32). Springer International Publishing.
