History and stories
The Anna Kournikova virus: a picture that was not a picture
The attachment was called AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs. Most people never saw the last four letters.
1 min readStory
The short version
In 2001, millions of people received an email promising a photo of a tennis star. The attachment was a program that emailed itself onward.
The story
On February 11, 2001, emails started arriving with the line “Hi: Check This!” and an attachment named AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs. It looked like a photo of the Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova.
The file was a small program. Windows hid known file extensions by default, so many people saw only “AnnaKournikova.jpg” and assumed it was a picture. Opening it on a computer with Microsoft Outlook sent the same email to everyone in the address book.
The worm was written by Jan de Wit, a 20-year-old in the Netherlands, using a ready-made virus building kit he found online. He turned himself in days later.
Why it mattered
The worm did not damage files, but it clogged email systems around the world for days. It showed how little skill was needed: a toolkit, a tempting subject and people’s curiosity did the rest.
The lesson today
Attackers still disguise programs as documents and pictures, and they still use subjects people want to click. Today’s version is an invoice, a voicemail or a shared file. Look at what a file really is before opening it, and be suspicious of anything you were not expecting, even from someone you know.
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