Slammer--the first 'Warhol' worm?
 

"Last week's SQL Slammer worm infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable computers within 10 minutes, opening a new era of fast-spreading viruses on the Internet, according to a new report.

The findings come from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), a mainly U.S. government-funded think tank devoted to developing tools and standards for measuring Internet traffic. According to a CAIDA report issued late last week, the SQL Slammer worm--also known as Sapphire--doubled in size every 8.5 seconds when it first appeared, and reached the full rate at which it was scanning for vulnerable computers--a rate of more than 55 million scans per second--after about three minutes.

This puts Slammer into the realm of what is known as a "flash worm"--which some researchers have also named a "Warhol worm," because it could infect the entire Internet in 15 minutes.

Researchers have theorized about such worms for some time, and a paper presented at last year's Usenix Security Symposium by security experts Vern Paxson, Stuart Staniford and Nicholas Weaver also predicted the emergence of such worms. Until now, however, no examples have been released into the wild..."

Read the full article here

Is this good or bad? Because I'm not sure.

Ok, good for the worm programmer, bad for the legit companies and individuals using any portion of the internet. Problem was, most of the techs didn't patch the vunerability, which was found last June. I don't understand why they wouldn't patch any security issues, if it affects the database it shouldn't be too hard to upgrade those few computers holding it.

One thing a friend reccomended to me was Black Ice Firewall. He said to set it to "Paranoid". When someone is even trying to sniff a port of yours, it will block the IP, and make your computer seem as though it's offline. I don't know much about firewalls, but I'm downloading the demo now to see if it really is what he says it is.