Probing the Net’s dark corners
p2pnet.net News:- "A worm’s release illuminates, for a few moments, dark corners of the network just as supernovae illuminate dark and distant corners of the universe."
That’s the poetic description of what happens to a piece of malevolent software once it’s turned loose online, and it comes in a New Scientist report which outlines a technique called telescope analysis to study a worm’s spread.
“The computer used to kick-start the ‘Witty worm’, which infected more than 12,000 computers worldwide on 20 March 2004, has been traced,” says the report.
In just 10 seconds, this ‘patient zero’ targeted 110 computers in a US military base in Europe and via them spread round the world in 75 minutes.”
Nicholas Weaver and Vern Paxson from the International Computer Science Institute in California, and Abhishek Kumar from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, used the technique to study the Witty Worm’s spread.
“The approach involves probing portions of the internet which normally don’t see much network traffic, but light up when a worm is spreading,” adds New Scientist..
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See:-
New Scientist – Tracking a PC worm’s back to its source, June 4, 2005
