NBI: 'Love Bug' may not be a Filipino creation, after all

The "ILOVEYOU" virus which wreaked havoc on millions of computers around the world early this month may not have been "Philippine-made" after all.

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) revealed yesterday that the so-called "Love Bug" which caused some $10 billion in damage worldwide was apparently not an original creation of Filipino hackers.

"We are inclined to believe that the virus had been created by another person and was just modified and renamed," an NBI investigator said.

The NBI anti-fraud and computer crimes division has narrowed down its list of suspects in the virus attack to two persons: Onel de Guzman and Michael Buen, both AMA Computer College students.

The NBI investigator, who asked not to be named, said the division has found striking similarities in the pattern of the ILOVEYOU virus to those of older viruses.

"There are patterns in the program of the virus that looked the same as those in other viruses which are already existing," the prober said. "If you would really look closely, you could tell that only a few words were changed."

The virus, which replicates in computer files and spreads to other computers, is known to attack in two ways -- as a "worm" or as a "Trojan horse."

Worms are computer programs that "crawl" into secured data such as those in computer hard drives, and destroy or erase files.

Trojan horses, on the other hand, are programs that only "come alive" when "activated" by an infected computer and perform a variety of functions.

In the case of the ILOVEYOU virus, the Trojan horse steals passwords for Internet accounts and sends the passwords to an electronic mail (e-mail) address in Manila.

The NBI prober said that the basic program of the virus was already available on the Internet itself and has been downloaded by hackers in the past.

But he noted that renaming it ILOVEYOU to make it appear like a love letter was a "brilliant move" on the part of those who launched the mischievous virus to the world.