Slammer--the first 'Warhol' worm?

Last week's SQL Slammer worm infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable computers within 10 minutes, opening a new era of fast-spreading viruses on the Internet, according to a new report. The findings come from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), a mainly U.S. government-funded think tank devoted to developing tools and standards for measuring Internet traffic. According to a CAIDA report issued late last week, the SQL Slammer worm--also known as Sapphire--doubled in size every 8.5 seconds when it first appeared, and reached the full rate at which it was scanning for vulnerable computers--a rate of more than 55 million scans per second--after about three minutes.

This puts Slammer into the realm of what is known as a "flash worm"--which some researchers have also named a "Warhol worm," because it could infect the entire Internet in 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.

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