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This puts Slammer into the realm of what some researchers call a "Warhol" worm because it could infect the entire Internet within 15 minutes. Researchers have theorized about such worms for some time, and a paper presented at last year's Usenix Security Symposium by security experts Vern Paxson, Stuart Staniford and Nicholas Weaver also predicted the emergence of such worms. Until now, however, no examples have been released into the wild. The authors of the CAIDA report--David Moore, Vern Paxson, Stefan Savage, Colleen Shannon, Stuart Staniford and Nicholas Weaver--noted that the worm paves the way for future versions that could spread even more quickly and create more chaos. Slammer's spread was two orders of magnitude faster than 28 Code Red, which infected 359,000 computers in the summer of 2001, and doubled in size only about every 37 minutes, according to CAIDA. Slammer infected fewer computers than Code Red, but was significantly limited by flaws in its design. For example, a faulty random-number generator meant that the worm was not able to scan all possible Internet addresses. Also, said CAIDA researchers, its method of random scanning was so aggressive that it quickly bogged down networks and was unable to continue operating at full throttle. The researchers noted that although the nature of the SQL bug exploited by Slammer helped it to spread quickly--the bug was exploitable by sending a single packet to a particular UDP ((user datagram protocol) port--other types of worms could spread just as quickly. Traditional virus-blocking methods are now practically useless for stopping the new breed of worm, the report's authors noted. On Friday, Stuart Okin, Microsoft UK's chief security officer, warned that morphed forms of Slammer could cause more problems than the original. This is because Slammer had no payload, so it did not do any direct damage aside from the effects of its denial-of-service nature, and systems could be cleaned by being switched off and on again. Get Up to Speed 34 Enterprise Security 35 Open source 36 Utility Computing 37 VoIP 38 Web services 39 Wi-fi 40 Spam: Report Card 2004 ZDNet's Dan Farber and NetsEdge Research Group's Peter Christy look at the latest weapons used to fight spam.
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