Anna Kournikova Virus

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What Does Anna Kournikova Virus Mean?

The Anna Kournikova Virus was a worm that spread by email, disguised as an email attachment with the filed name “AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs.” The virus was a Visual Basic script that, once opened, emailed itself to all the contacts within the user’s Outlook address book. Anna Kournikova was a payload-free virus, however, and did not erase any files or send information back to the creator.

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Techopedia Explains Anna Kournikova Virus

The worm was created using a tool kit for creating viruses and released in February 2001 by Dutch programmer Jan De Wit. De Wit turned himself in to the authorities when it became clear how widely his virus had spread. The use of the Russian tennis player’s name was a clever move by De Wit as search queries for images of Kournikova were at one time among the top searched strings on Google.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.