Anna Kournikova (computer virus)

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The Anna Kournikova virus (also known as VBS/OnTheFly, VBS/SST and VBS_Kalamar) was an email worm released on 11 February 2001 by Jan de Wit, a 20-year-old Dutch man who used the online name "OnTheFly". He created it within a few hours using the Vbs Worm Generator, a toolkit developed by an Argentine programmer known as "[K]Alamar". The worm was disguised as a photograph of Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova in an attachment named AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs. When opened on a Windows computer using Microsoft Outlook, it attempted to send itself to every address in the user's address book. The worm spread worldwide on 12 February. Contemporary reports variously put the number of infected computers at hundreds of thousands or millions. The worm did not corrupt stored data, but the email traffic it generated threatened to overload systems, and some businesses shut down their email services as a precaution. De Wit posted an online admission and surrendered to police on 14 February. In September...

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