system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why aren't there big "virus-scares" anymore?

I remember that in the early 2000s there were a lot of scares because of malware. A lot of them were just viruses written by some dudes at home - but still: malware like "ILOVEYOU", different worms like "Blaster" or "MyDoom", made people afraid to even make the simplest things on the internet (reading mails, downloading stuff, etc.).

Obviously there were big steps in the Antivirus-Programming and such, but wouldn't the malware-developers have made the same big steps? Wouldn't it be even more lucrative today to write malware and scare the old and the poor? Why is the malware-panic basically gone?
gpt
There are several reasons, almost none of which have to do with "the novelty of scaring people has worn off". 

Originally, viruses tended to be malicious for the sake of it. There were still  'trojan horses' but there were also worms that self-replicated, filling up all available disk space, or viruses that corrupted computers. Those types of viruses had no use except to damage the computer of the infected individual.

Then came the advent of malware and scareware. Using infections as a means to fool people into spending money. The objective of those types of infections was to cripple - but not destroy - machines. Then you would go to a specific website (if you had no other means of recovery) and buy the "fix". 

These viruses were obvious and debilitating. Huge money and effort went into anti-virus efforts to combat these types of infections. Microsoft spent a great deal of time closing vulnerabilities in Windows. Education campaigns made anti-virus software ubiquitous. It became a significant challenge to create infections that could circumvent the removal tools. 

It was still possible, of course, but harder and harder. 

More importantly, as people became better educated, it became less profitable to infect people's machines with scareware to get them to buy software. Eventually the strategy changed. Malware became less about very obviously crippling a users machine and more about subjugating the machine silently, for use in a botnet or a spam email relay. These infections required the user to remain oblivious because the infection needed to stay on as many machines as possible in order to function at maximum capacity. 

So, as the needs of the virus makers changed, so did the profile of viruses. 

It's very much like actual viruses. Or, more appropriately, like the game Pandemic. A virus that is wide spread but not very dangerous doesn't get a lot of attention because it's not really doing anyone any specific harm. But as soon as it becomes malicious enough to affect people's lives, resources are quickly diverted to circumventing the virus - and in the case of a large scale, world wide infection, identifying and removing a virus could cripple a whole botnet before the creator can deploy a patch. 

TL;DR we have a large infrastructure now that is dedicated to fighting malware, and that didn't exist 20 years ago. Releasing a large, dangerous virus would just make it easier to identify and clean before it could be profitable.