Handbook on Securing Cyber-Physical Critical Infrastructure

Chapter 4

Evolution of Widely Spreading Worms and Countermeasures: Epidemic Theory and Application

Wei Yu, Nan Zhang, Xinwen Fu and Brian Rivera

4.1 Introduction

Worm refers to a malicious software program that propagates itself on the network to infect other computers. The propagation of the worm is based on exploiting vulnerabilities of computers on the Internet. Many real-world worms have caused notable damage in cyber space. For example, the “Code-Red” worm took advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability on the index server of Microsoft IIS 4.0/5.0 to infect more than 350,000 computers on the Internet in less than 14 h, and caused more than $1.2 billion dollars of damages [1]. In January 2003, the “Slammer” worm-infected nearly 75,000 ...