If users subsequently e-mailed infected documents as attachments, recipients with Microsoft Outlook would activate the virus upon opening the attachment, thereby sending copies of the infected document to the first 50 contacts in their address books. If the document contained sensitive material, this would cause security problems. Some companies shut down their e-mail servers to keep this from happening. However, the virus would not automatically transmit infected documents to people in the victims address book. Nonetheless, victims could inadvertently send infected documents to other people via e-mail or floppy disk.
Game s over.
In Word 97, Melissa disabled the command that would let users receive notification if a document contained a macro and open the document without enabling the macro. And Melissa set Word 2000 to the lowest macro-virus security level and blocked settings that would let users raise security levels. As Melissa propagated, it quickly began to overwhelm and force the closure of e-mail servers. This represented a particular hardship for many small organizations that use a single server for e-mail and other important applications. Millions in losses Melissa caused serious disruptions at such big organizations as E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., Honeywell, Intel, Lockheed-Martin, Lucent Technologies, Microsoft, and the US Marine Corps.