Anna Kournikova (computer virus)
| Type | Email vbs attachment |
|---|---|
| Point of origin | Netherlands |
| Author(s) | Jan de Wit |
| Written in | VBScript |
Anna Kournikova (named by its author as "Vbs.OnTheFly Created By OnTheFly") was a computer worm written by a 20-year-old Dutch student named Jan de Wit --who called himself 'OnTheFly'-- on February 11, 2001. It was designed to trick email users into opening a mail message purportedly containing a picture of the tennis player Anna Kournikova, while actually hiding a malicious program. The worm arrives in an email with the subject line "Here you have, ;0)" and an attached file called AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs. When launched under Microsoft Windows the file does not display a picture of Anna Kournikova but launches a viral Visual Basic Script that forwards itself to everybody in the Microsoft Outlook address book of the victim.
OnTheFly created Anna Kournikova using a simple and online available Visual Basic Worm Generator program by an Argentinian programmer called [K]Alamar. While similar to the ILOVEYOU worm that struck a year earlier, in 2000, the Anna Kournikova worm did not corrupt data on the infected computer.
Apparently, the author created the worm in a matter of hours. "The young man had downloaded a program on Sunday, February 11, from the Internet and later the same day, around 3:00 p.m., set the worm loose in a newsgroup." De Wit turned himself in to authorities in the town of Sneek located in the northern Dutch province of Friesland. "By the time he understood what the worm did, he had conferred with his parents and decided to turn himself in to the police."
The efforts of virus writer working undercover for the FBI, David L. Smith (author of the Melissa virus, who was still serving his sentence) assisted in tracking down OnTheFly's real identity. De Wit turned himself in to the police in his hometown Sneek on February 14, 2001, after he posted a letter of confession on a website and a newsgroup of player Anna Kournikova (alt.binaries.anna-kournikova) dated February 13. In it, he admitted creating the virus using a toolkt and explained his motivations as to see whether the IT community has learned their lesson to better secure systems in the aftermath of previous virus infections. But besides admission and regret he also attributed external blame for the rate of spreading on the beauty of the tennis player (he's had pinups of the tennis star on his website) and blamed those who opened the email, writing "it's their own fault they got infected."
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Wikipedia