What made Melissa different from previous viruses?
Gryaznov: It was the first mass-mailing virus, which used e-mail to spread on a large scale. What harm did the virus do? Gryaznov: In some cases the load on the e-mail servers in some organizations was so high that the servers were effectively shut down. How many computers were affected and what did the virus do? Gryaznov: Hundreds of thousands of computers were affected. That’s a guess…Melissa infected other documents a user opened in Microsoft Word. It also connected to Outlook if it was running and selected 50 entries in the address book and e-mailed an infected document to those addresses…including mailing lists…As a result, the virus was sent not just to 50 people, but to thousands of people easily. We didn’t have any firm numbers to go by, but we did have reports from customers saying their Exchange servers were overwhelmed. How long did the outbreak last? Gryaznov: Several days, but the infections continued to be registered for a long time after that. It was just a macro v
