On a sunny day in May 2000, I struggled to finish all what I planned before leaving home, when a colleague came: “Juraj, I got a strange message, I cannot open its attachment.”
“Don’t worry, Sari, I will look at it, forward the message to me,” I answered almost not moving my eyes from the screen. She thanked me, and left to her office across the corridor.
An e-mail from Sari came a couple of minutes later. I got alerted by a pop up message on my screen, so I switched the windows, and opened the message. Being in a hurry, I did not waste much time reading it, I simply double clicked the attachmed, and … nothing. I doble clicked the attachment again, and got no reaction. Only they I started to read the message, and I found that it was likely the recently spread virus known under the name of “I love you”.
Just as I realized that I very probably infected my computer with the new virus, I found also a strange activity on the e-mail. I started to receive error messages and out of office notifications from unknown people – in response to my message with the subject line “I love you”. What the virus did was that it started to send e-mail from mail mailbox using the default address book – it was the UN address book. Many people say that this virus propagated itself using Microsoft Outlook. I can confirm that it propagated well (unfortunately) also using ccMail by IBM used at that time by the UN Secretariat.
What to do? How to stop spreading the messages? The easiest idea that I got was to pull out the Ethernet cable. But the virus progressed already through the letter C in the alphabetic order of the UN address book. I looked through recipients of my e-mail, and I found the most embarrassing thing that could happen. Under letter A, there was an entry “Annan, Kofi”. So the Secretary General of the UN got a message labelled “I love you” from me. While I appreciated Mr. Annan very much, as the Secretary General, this message was definitely not appropriate. At that time, there was no feature like “recall message”, and definitely not in ccMail, so the message went to the high profile recipient, and there was nothing that I could do about it.
I rushed to a colleague: “Gerald, I made a mistake and infected my computer by I love you virus. What can I do about it? It were even to the SG.”
“How did it happen, Juraj?”
“I was busy, I did not check the e-mail, and I clicked on the attachment. It started sending love letters through the e-mail immediately, but at least I stopped it by pulling out the blue Ethernet cable.”
“I have seen some tool to repair it, let me to check again on the web.”
“Thank you, Gerlad”, I left his office reassured that a remedy will come.
In the meantime, I checked the e-mails – this time off-line, as I did not want to send more love e-mails. Mr. Clark, whom I did not know, but who surely got one of my love e-mail responded furiously: “Who are you. Why do you waste my time by sending this e-mail?”
What to answer? I did not know, but anyway, I could not answer while being off-line. Scrolling further, I found another message from Mr. Clark with the subject line “I love you”. So he clicked on the attachment, and his computer got infected. At least some funny moment in the stress of the last 15 minutes. I tried to imagine, whether Mr. Clark got a similar message, as he sent to me, and what did he answer.
My phone rang, Gerald called me: “Juraj, can you come? I found something.”
“Look at this,” he showed me an article about the virus on his screen. The article suggested also a remedy that consisted of editing the computer registry and applying a tool to clean the computer of the virus. “Take this,” Gerald gave me a printout of the page, “Do you have a diskette?”
“I bring one.”
“Wait, I must have some empty diskette in the drawer.” he copied the tool on an empty diskette.
“What should I do about people who got e-mails from me?”
“Let it be. Most of the people have read about the virus by now. They will understand that it is just a virus.”
“Do you think that the SG will understand?”
“I think that his e-mails are sorted by a secretary.”
“I hope so. Thank you, Gerald, it is great. I will let you know, whether it works.”
“It will work, don’t worry.”
My computer was not the only one at the UNECE that got infected that day. I considered myself as an expert IT user, it was embarrassing that my computer got infected so easily. Fortunately, the remedy came quickly. I became more careful, and never had similar problems later. And I never sent any other message to Mr. Annan.
Juraj Riečan 