Out of boredom, I search the web to check if there’s a result for this keyword “melissa”, I was surprised to see a lot of results. Of course one of results is my blog but what’s important is that there are several sites that define the word “melissa”.

From the definition in Wikipedia, Melissa is a name given to a female. In greek methology, Melissa means honey bee. In 2007, Melissa is the 117th most popular name in the United States. It ranked second place in the year 1977. It was among the top ten most popular names for girls from 1967 to 1984. Melissa also refers to the plant known as lemon balm.

On March 26, 1999, Melissa shut down Internet mail systems that got clogged with infected e-mails propagating from the worm. Melissa was not originally designed for harm, but it overflowed servers and caused unplanned problems.

Melissa was first distributed in the Usenet discussion group alt.sex. The virus was inside a file called “List.DOC”, which contained passwords that allow access into 80 pornographic websites. The worm’s original form was sent via e-mail to many people.

Melissa was written by David L. Smith in Aberdeen Township, New Jersey, and named after a lap dancer he encountered in Florida. The creator of the virus called himself Kwyjibo, but was shown to be identical to macrovirus writers VicodinES and Alt-F11 who had several Word-files with the same characteristic Globally Unique Identifier (GUID), a serial number that was earlier generated with the network card MAC address as a component. Smith was sentenced to 20 months in a federal prison and fined $5,000 United States dollars. This arrest was a result of collaboration between the FBI, New Jersey State Police and Monmouth Internet.

Source: Wikipedia