ILOVEYOU worm

2000

Onel de Guzman crafted his creation with straightforward criminal intent: he couldn’t afford dial-up service, so he built a worm that would steal other people’s passwords so he could piggyback off of their accounts.

But the malware so cleverly took advantage of several flaws in Windows 95 that it spread like wildfire, and soon millions of infected computers were sending out copies of the worm and beaming passwords back to a Filipino email address.

Onel de Guzman was never charged with a crime, because nothing he did was illegal in the Philippines at the time, but he expressed regret in an interview 20 years later, saying he never intended the malware to spread as far as it did.