Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

Conclusions

Where are all of these future worm trends heading? I don't want to be an alarmist or prophet of doom. I just call them like I see them, without a huge agenda here. That said, given the trajectory we're on, I strongly believe that a determined attacker will temporarily disable major portions of the Internet in the next five years. Using the worm techniques described throughout this chapter, an attacker could write a worm that disables the Internet for a couple of days. I think it'll be down for two to three days, as we all scramble to distribute patches to our systems the old-fashioned way: via overnight mail services and couriers. You won't be able to download a patch from a vendor across the Internet, because the Internet itself ...