From: Kevin Wampler (wampler@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 01 2004 - 00:06:25 PST
In "How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time" the authors suggest some
techniques by which a 1337 hax0r with m4d sk1llz could have totally pwn3d
us n00b Internet users. These results are drawn in large part from a
mathematical model of worm propagation among susceptible hosts, which is
checked against data of the spread of actual worms, such as Code Red.
The continuous differential equation formulation of worm propagation used
in this paper might appear to be a bit simplistic, but given its
correlation with actual data seems to be an accurate model. The
suggestions given in the paper for speeding the spread of a worm, or for
allowing a worm to spread undetected seem to have the potential to be very
effective.
Other than the observation that most of the applications of the results in
this paper are evil, it is not clear that a centralized `Cyber-CDC' agency
such as that proposed is either necessary of particularly useful. Given
the potential for very rapid spreading of worms, it is unlikely that any
agency could control this without a potentially worrying amount of control
over and monitoring of Internet traffic. Furthermore, despite the great
success of some recent worms, the Internet remains quite usable. It is
likely that current corporate virus prevention products combined with a
diverse and well provisioned Internet are sufficient to reduce the effect
of worms to something less than disastrous.
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