Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

Bigger Isn't Always Better: The Un-Superworm

There is one problem with the superworm capabilities we discussed in the last section. With all of these bells and whistles, superworms could very likely become bloatware. This term is applied to software that is just too big and complex for the task it needs to accomplish. A worm with all of the superworm features would likely be very complicated and large. Superworms' complexity could lead to system crashes, and their size might get them detected even if they attempt to implement stealth through polymorphism. If I see large numbers of one-megabyte files transferring themselves into my network, I'm going to take notice, even if they happen to be polymorphic and metamorphic.

So, although the general ...