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The man behind the world’s first major outbreak of computer virus admitted his guilt, 20 years after his software infected millions of machines around the world.
Filipino Onel de Guzmán, now 44, says he unleashed the Love Bug computer worm to steal passwords so he could access the Internet without paying.
He claims he never intended for it to spread globally.
And he says he regrets the damage his code caused.
“I did not expect it to reach the United States and Europe. I was surprised,” he said in an interview for Crime Dot Com, an upcoming book on cybercrime.
The Love Bug pandemic started on May 4, 2000.
The victims received an email attachment titled LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU. It contained malicious code that would overwrite files, steal passwords, and automatically send copies of itself to all contacts in the victim’s Microsoft Outlook address book.
Within 24 hours, it was causing major problems worldwide and infecting 45 million machines. It also overwhelmed organizations’ email systems, and some IT managers disconnected parts of their infrastructure to avoid infection.
This led to damage and outage estimates of billions of pounds.
In the UK, Parliament closed its email network for several hours to protect itself, and even the Pentagon was affected.
In the past year, Melissa’s mistake is believed to have infected a million machines with similar tactics. However, Love Bug overshadowed previous outbreaks and exposed just how vulnerable the attack from the world’s increasing internet connectivity was.
Investigators tracked the virus to a registered email address in an apartment in Manila, the capital of the Philippines.
The occupant’s brother was Onel de Guzmán, a computer science student at the city’s AMA Computer College. He was a member of an underground piracy group called Grammersoft and quickly became the prime suspect in a police investigation.
De Guzman’s lawyer organized a press conference on May 11, in which de Guzmán seemed to speak little English.
When asked if he could have accidentally released the virus, de Guzmán said, “It is possible.”
At the time, the Philippines did not have a law on hacking, and neither Guzmán nor anyone else was prosecuted.
Suspicion also fell on De Guzman’s fellow student Michael Buen, who has been cited online as a co-author of Love Bug.
I set out to locate Onel de Guzmán and solve the 20-year-old mystery of the origin of Love Bug.
Online rumors claimed that De Guzmán had moved to Germany, Austria or the United States. Some claimed that he had been recruited by Microsoft after the outbreak. Everything turned out to be broad of the brand.
In a forum dedicated to the Philippine underworld, a user claimed in 2016 that De Guzmán ran a mobile phone repair shop in the Quiapo district of Manila. In April 2019, I visited the area hoping to find the suspect, only to find an expanding marketplace containing dozens of mobile phone repair shops.
I wrote Onel de Guzman’s name on a sheet of paper and randomly showed it to the store workers in the hope that someone would recognize him. Finally, an employee said he knew De Guzmán and believed that he was now working in another phone repair booth in a shopping center elsewhere in Manila.
After several hours wandering around the shopping center and showing De Guzman’s name, I was taken to a narrow and messy post at the back of the building, and after waiting several hours for him to appear, Onel de Guzmán arrived.
He admitted to creating Love Bug, which he said was a revamped version of an earlier virus that he had coded to steal internet access passwords.
In the era of dial-up Internet access, such passwords were needed to connect, and de Guzmán says he couldn’t afford one.
He claims that he initially sent the virus only to Philippine victims, with whom he communicated in chat rooms, because he only wanted to steal internet access passwords that worked in his local area.
However, in the spring of 2000, he modified the code, adding an automatic propagation feature that would send copies of the virus to victims’ Outlook contacts, using a flaw in Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system. He also created a title for the email attachment that would have global appeal, tempting people around the world to open it.
“I realized that a lot of people want a boyfriend, they love each other, they want love, so I called it that,” she said.
Onel de Guzmán says he regrets the damage his creation caused
De Guzmán claims he initially sent the virus to someone in Singapore, and then went out drinking with a friend. The first thing he knew of the global chaos he had unleashed was when his mother told him that the police were hunting a hacker in Manila.
He explained that his mother hid his computer equipment. De Guzman insists that Buen had nothing to do with Love Bug and that he was its only creator.
After a period of rest, de Guzmán returned to computer work but did not return to university. Now he runs the small cabin with another member of staff.
He says he regrets writing the virus and the infamy that has brought him.
“Sometimes I have my picture on the internet,” he said.
“My friends say, ‘It’s you!’ I’m a shy person, I don’t want this. “
