#9 Reonel Ramones and Onel de Guzman

On 5 May 2000, two young Filipino computer programmers named Reonel Ramones and Onel de Guzman became targets of a criminal investigation by agents of the Philippines' National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) for making malware “ILOVEYOU.”

 ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as Love Letter, was a computer worm that attacked tens of millions of Windows personal computers on and after 5 May 2000 when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and the attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs".

Systemic weaknesses in the design of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Windows were exploited that allowed malicious code capable of complete access to the operating system, secondary storage, and system and user data simply by unwitting users clicking on an icon.

Since there were no laws in the Philippines against writing malware at the time, both Ramones and de Guzman were released with all charges dropped by state prosecutors. To address this legislative deficiency, the Philippine Congress enacted Republic Act No. 8792, otherwise known as the E-Commerce Law, in July 2000, just two months after the worm outbreak.

In 2002, the ILOVEYOU virus obtained a world record for being the most virulent computer virus then.

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