WHAT IS A WORM?

Worms

November 3, 1988 is already coming to be known as Black Thursday.  System administrators around the country came to work on that day and discovered that their networks of computers were laboring under a huge load.  If they were able to log in and generate a system status listing, they saw what appeared to be dozens or hundreds of "shell" (command interpreter) processes.  If they tried to kill the processes, they found that new processes appeared faster than they could kill them.  Rebooting the computer seemed to have no effect within minutes after starting up again, the machine was overloaded by these mysterious processes.

These systems had been invaded by a worm.

A worm is a destructive program that makes and facilitates the distribution of copies of itself; for example, from one disk drive to another, or via memory, using up the computer's resources and eventually taking the system down, or by copying itself using email or another transport mechanism.  The worm may do damage and/or compromise the security of the computer.  It may arrive via exploitation of a system vulnerability or by clicking on an infected e-mail. 

Worms are a nuisance of anti-virus researchers and supposedly the Grail for hackers.

The following pages will educate you on the history of three of the most recent worms to plague personal and business computer systems and networks, as well as some comments from intrusion prevention industry leaders.  Additional information instructs on how to spot potential worms and take immediate effective action to rid yourself of these technological pests.  Finally, users will find the basic security "best practices" from Symantec.

Please see following links for more information virus, logic bomb, Worm.ExploreZip virus and Morris worm.