In April 2019 a journalist followed a tip from an obscure internet forum to a market stall in Manila, where a quiet man was repairing mobile phones. He was Onel de Guzman, and nearly two decades earlier he had brought much of the world’s email to a halt. As a broke student at AMA Computer College in the late 1990s, de Guzman believed internet access was a human right. His thesis proposal was a Trojan that would steal other people’s dial-up logins. The faculty rejected it as illegal, he dropped out, and he built it anyway.

This episode traces how a messy VBScript file became a global meltdown on May 4, 2000. Disguised as a text document and sent with the subject line I love you, the worm mailed itself to every contact in a victim’s address book, overwrote images and hid music files, and choked corporate mail servers from Hong Kong to Washington. The damage was estimated at 10 billion dollars. Then came the twist: the Philippines had no law against computer hacking, and every charge was dropped.

• The attachment was named with a double extension ending in .vbs, which Windows hid by default so it looked like a harmless text file.
• De Guzman first limited the worm to Manila, then removed the geographic restriction shortly before release.
• An estimated 10 percent of internet-connected computers were compromised, including more than 2,000 U.S. Army workstations, and NASA lost data for good.
• His mother hid the computer tower before police raided the apartment on May 8 but left the floppy disks behind.
• Prosecutors tried credit card fraud and malicious mischief statutes, and by late August 2000 all charges against him were dropped.