August 20, 2001, 2:37 pm
Flash Security Focus:
- Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet
Stuart Staniford, Gary Grim, Roelof Jonkman,
Silicon Defense, 8/16/2001
In a recent very ingenious analysis, Nick Weaver at UC Berkeley proposed the possibility of a Warhol Worm that could spread across the Internet and infect all vulnerable servers in less than 15 minutes (much faster than the hours or days seen in Worm infections to date, such as Code Red).
In this note, we observe that there is a variant of the Warhol strategy that could plausibly be used and that could result in all vulnerable servers on the Internet being infected in less than thirty seconds (possibly significantly less). We refer to this as a Flash Worm, or flash infection.
We have run out of hyberbolic adjectives to describe how seriously vulnerable the Internet is to security disruptions, so we won’t comment further on the social implications of this.
- Warhol Worms: The Potential for Very Fast Internet Plagues
by
Nicholas C Weaver
(nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu)
“In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes of fame”
-Andy Warhol
[Security Focus]
