Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

Why Worms?

Attackers use worms because they offer scale that cannot be easily achieved with other types of attacks. Worms take the inherent power of large distributed networks and use it to undermine the networks. Attackers employ these worm capabilities to achieve numerous goals, including taking over vast numbers of systems, making traceback more difficult, and amplifying damage. Let's explore each of these goals in detail to get an idea of what worms can do.

Taking over Vast Numbers of Systems

Suppose an attacker wants to take over 10,000 machines around the world. Perhaps the attacker needs this many systems to crack an encryption key or password. With 10,000 systems working in tandem, the attacker could break the encryption almost 10,000 ...