Patch Tuesday And The Enduring Challenge Of Windows' Backwards Compatibility
Rapid7, Wednesday, January 28th, 2026
If you received an email with the subject 'I LOVE YOU' and an attachment called 'LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT', would you open it? Probably not, but back in the year 2000, plenty of people did exactly that.
The internet learned a hard lesson about the disproportionate power available to a university dropout with some VBScript skills, and millions of ordinary people suffered the anguish of deleted family photos or even reputational damage as the worm propagated itself across their entire Outlook address book.
In the quarter century since ILOVEYOU rampaged across global networks, cybersecurity has moved from a niche topic to an 'everyone' problem, and many users are wary of all sorts of threats. In recent years, the increasing ubiquity and urgency of AI adoption across the business landscape has attracted the attention of both security researchers and threat actors.