Melissa

Melissa is a macro virus that appeared in spring of 1999. The virus received a great deal of media attention and like Michelangelo caused little damage, although it was very widespread. Melissa began spreading exactly one month before CIH released its payload, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in East Asia. It is one of the first viruses to achieve "rock star" status.

Melissa infects the Normal.dot template, which is used by default in all Word documents. This gives the virus the ability to infect and send other documents than just the porn site list, potentially leak sensitive information. Users can also unknowingly spread the virus when other documents become infected and they send them to another computer. If any document is opened or a new document is created, that document will be infected.

Melissa also has another payload that triggers itself once an hour and chooses the minute of the payload's delivery by the day (as an example, if the day is April 19, the payload will be delivered on the 19th minute of every hour that day). If an infected document is opened or closed at that minute, Melissa will insert this text into the document.

As macro viruses are relatively easy to create, Melissa spawned several variants. Most are completely unremarkable, while others have a few interesting features.

Assilem

• Assilem is an entire sub-family of Melissa that has most of the functionality if the original virus, with the exception of the mass-mailing capability. These can only infect other documents when they are executed on a clean computer. Assilem is Melissa backwards.

Melissa.W (AKA Prilissa)

• The virus arrives as an email attachment. The email text says "This document is very Important and you've GOT to read this!!!"
• When Prilissa activates, it displays the message: "Vine…Vide…Vice…Moslem Power Never End…Your Computer Have Just Been Terminated By -= CyberNET =- Virus!!" -". The user's documents will be covered in randomly colored squares. It then overwrites the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to format the hard drive.

Melissa.BG

• This variant is also known as "Résumé". It is sometimes considered a separate family, Word97/Resume. It arrives in an email with the following characteristics:Subject: Resume - Janet Simons

The virus is reported to caused $80 million of damage in North America alone and about $1.1 billion worldwide. Some estimates say at least 100,000 computers were infected and 300 organizations reported infections. Game publisher GT Interactive accidentally sent out the virus in a press release. The company said Melissa did not do them any damage, but did cause a great deal of embarrassment.

The virus was originally named Melissa by its creator. He named it after a stripper he knew in Florida. It goes against the policy of antivirus companies to give a virus the same name the author had intended. However, in this case, Jimmy Kuo of McAfee decided the name had already stuck to the virus, and that Melissa should be the official name.