[7] This led de Guzman to claim that his professors were closed-minded,[4] and he ultimately dropped out of the college and began development of the worm.

[10] The email format is considered to be one of the first examples of malware using social engineering,[11] by encouraging victims to open the attached file under the pretext they had a lover who was attempting to contact them.

[13] De Guzman also claimed that a bug in Windows 95, where code in email attachments was automatically run upon being clicked, contributed to the worm's success.

A user could easily change the worm to replace essential files and destroy the system, allowing more than 25 variations of ILOVEYOU to spread across the Internet, each doing different kinds of damage.

Others modified the email subject to target a specific audience, like the variant "Cartolina" ("postcard") in Italian or "BabyPic" for adults.

[17][18] Because the worm used mailing lists as its source of targets, the messages often appeared to come from acquaintances and were therefore often regarded as "safe" by their victims, providing further incentive to open them.

[28] Operations of the Department of Defence were significantly obstructed,[28] with the Central Intelligence Agency additionally affected[17] and the United States Army having 2258 infected workstations which cost approximately US$79,200 to recover.

[29] The Veterans Health Administration received 7,000,000 ILOVEYOU emails during the outbreak, requiring 240 man-hours of work to resolve the problems created.

[28] The events inspired the song "E-mail" on the Pet Shop Boys' UK top-ten album of 2002, Release, the lyrics of which play thematically on the human desires which enabled the mass destruction of this computer infection.

[citation needed] "I love you [rev.eng]" exhibited in July 2006 is a revamped and expanded version of an exhibition shown in June 2002 in the Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt, in February 2003 at transmediale in Berlin, in August 2004 at the Watson Institute of the Brown University USA and in October 2004 at the Museum for Communication Copenhagen, Denmark.

[33] In 2019, The Persistence of Chaos, a laptop infected with six viruses including ILOVEYOU was sold at auction by Chinese artist Guo O Dong.

[37] De Guzman attempted to hide the evidence by removing his computer from his apartment, but he accidentally left some disks behind that contained the worm, as well as information that implicated a possible co-conspirator.

[5] After surveillance and investigation by Darwin Bawasanta of Sky Internet, the NBI traced a frequently appearing telephone number[clarification needed] to Ramones' apartment in Manila.

Another idea was that they could be charged with malicious mischief, a felony (under the Philippines Revised Penal Code of 1932) involving damage to property.

[5] To show intent, the NBI investigated AMA Computer College, where de Guzman had dropped out at the very end of his final year.

[36] 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.

His last known public appearance was at the 2000 press conference, where he obscured his face and allowed his lawyer to answer most questions; his whereabouts remained unknown for 20 years afterward.

In May 2020, investigative journalist Geoff White revealed that while researching his cybercrime book Crime Dot Com, he had found de Guzman working at a mobile phone repair stall in Manila.