ILOVEYOU / Love Bug (2000): the mass-mailer worm that outran the law

May 2000: a VBScript email worm spread to ~45 million machines in ~24 hours, one of the first truly global malware events. It matters on the map for two reasons.

• The mechanism (fact). A VBScript attachment - LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs, hidden by Windows' default "hide known extensions" - auto-mailed itself to the victim's entire Outlook address book and overwrote local media files. Windows Scripting Host + pure social engineering ("ILOVEYOU").
• The law gap (fact). The author, a Manila student, was arrested but released - the Philippines had no applicable computer-crime statute in 2000, so charges were dropped. This directly catalyzed the Philippine E-Commerce Act (RA 8792) weeks later and fed the global push for cybercrime law (Budapest Convention, 2001).

Damage estimates run ~$5.5B-$15B (analyst estimates, wide spread). It's the archetypal mass-mailer - the direct ancestor of later email worms and today's phishing / supply-chain lures - and the first big demonstration of jurisdiction-arbitrage cybercrime: attacker in one state, victims worldwide, no extraditable offense.

Sources: CERT/CC advisories; contemporaneous press; Philippine RA 8792. Cross-refs: Malware_Lineage, Cybercrime_Law_Gap, spec-shadow-brokers-eternalblue, spec-shai-hulud-npm-worm.

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