From "The latest computer scourges, and their consequences", The Economist, Monday September 1st 2003

<http://www.ECONOMIST.COM/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2020978>

Blaster worked by creattingSpl a "buffer overrun in the remote procedure call". In English, that means it attacked {***}S/VAgreement piece of software used by Microsoft's Windows operating system to allow one computer to control another. It did so by causing that software to use memory too muchWOrder.

Most worms work by exploiting weaknesses in an operating system, howeverConj/Trans whoever wrote Blaster had a particularly refined sense of humour, since the website under attack was the one from which users could obtain a program to fix the very weakness in windowsCapitalization that the worm itself wereS/VAgreement exploiting.{1}

One way to deal with a wicked worm like Blaster is to design to designCut a fairy godmother worm that goes around repairing vulnerable machines automatically. AtPreposition the case of Blaster someone seems to have tried exactly that with a {***}MissingW called Welchi. However, according to Mr Haley, Welchi had causedVTense almost as many problems as Blaster itself, by overwhelming networks with "pings"-signals that checked for the presence of other computers.

Fortunately, as Nicholas Weaver of the University of California, Berkeley has pointed out.Fragment The algorithms,Punctuation that worms use to spread themselves are not particularly efficient. Blaster, after infecting a computer, searched atrandomSpace for others to infect. A clever worm, says Mr Weaver, would start with a list of 10,000 or so vulnerable computers. This could be assembled surreptitiously by several months of discreet probing over the internet. Such a worm, which Mr Weaver dubs a "Warhol worm" after Andy Warhol's famous aphorism about fame, could infect all those vulnerable computers in about 15 minutes, giving it a huge head start. If a Warhol worm were to be released, by the time anti-virus engineers came up with a patch to protect the vulnerability it exploited, it would be too late. And if the worm had a truly malicious payload that, say, deleted files pell-mell, the damage would dwarf that caused by recent viruses.