This month marks the tenth anniversary of the "Love Bug" virus. Since I was a sysadmin at the time, I can attest that, contrary to what the article seems to say, "Love Bug" was far from the first e-mail virus, and, when it was happening, the cause was much more readily identified. Love Bug was so much bigger than previous e-mail viruses not because of some special talent of the virus's author, but instead because Microsoft Exchange and Outlook had made significant inroads into businesses in the previous, say, two or three years. As with all Microsoft products of that era, Exchange and Outlook had security holes big enough to drive a truck through, and Love Bug just happened to be the first social-vector virus written explicitly to exploit them. It would not be the last.

I made sure the network I was responsible for did NOT use Microsoft products precisely because of this reason, and because of that Love Bug simply passed us by. I do recall having to set up a basic rule in our spam filter to bounce them, though.