How to own the Internet in your spare time

From: Masaharu Kobashi (mkbsh@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 30 2004 - 19:00:22 PST

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    1. Main result of the paper

       This paper presents the results of examining the behaviors of
       well known worms (computer virus) and their threat to the whole
       Internet. It also proposes development of Center for Disease Control
       to cope with the problems caused by the current as well as future
       worms.

    2. Strengths in this paper

       It presents the rare data of the observation of the behaviors of
       worms for substantial length of period. It is valuable in that it
       is hard to collect such data and the data shows the characteristics
       of the worms clearly.

       Another merit of the paper is the wide coverage of worms. It examines
       as many as seven different types of worms and it describes the mechanism
       of infection of each type in detail.

       Connectivity characteristics, such as the Pareto distribution of KaZaA
       are also discovered or, if they are not the first to find it, they
       at least provide such valuable and relevant information to the readers.

    3. Limitations and suggested improvements

       How the current anti-virus measures failed with those worms is a point
       of our great interest. But it is not discussed at all. Touching upon
       this subject would have made the paper more interesting and valuable.

       The proposition of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) comes a little
       abruptly and there is no argument on why the current efforts by wide
       variety of organizations, for-profit or non-profit, are not enough
       and why it has to be centralized. There can be a lot of counter
       arguments, just like, for example, an argument for preferring many
       competing entities to monopoly or oligopoly in economics.
       (But this is not a paper of sociology :)

    4. Relevance today and future
       
       The descriptions of the mechanism of infection and spreading are
       very helpful to develop anti-virus tools now and in the future.
       However, it may also provide more of vicious knowledge to potential
       future worm developers, although it is not intended by the authors.

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