In May 1999 a, what seemed to be, harmless email was suddenly sent to someone, who because of the early age of the internet, had no suspicions about the dangers of getting such a random message. The email had quite the interesting subject line as well, with it being classified as important, or urgent. The email was opened, and before you could blink their internet immediately begins throwing pornographic sites at them, and next thing they know, that same email that they had just opened was sent to the first fifty names in the person’s email address book.
The Melissa virus was created by a man named David L. Smith; who named the virus after an exotic dancer he met in Florida. Smith was eventually found and sentenced to 20 months in prison, as well as getting punishments of having to pay a $5,000 fine and a restriction on computer usage; he was only able to use computers with the permission from court authorization.
The Melissa virus had been sent through Microsoft Outlook, and in just a few days the Melissa virus was spread to thousands of computers. The virus, luckily, didn’t actually do any damage to the computers. However, they probably aided in destroying a lot of relationships.
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