On Tue, Sep 18, 2001 at 09:49:30AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: | Somebody did a paper about a hypothetical "Andy Warhol Virus", | studying how long it takes to take over a server, | how many servers you can attack per minute, and | what it would take to coordinate an attack that really hit everywhere. | 15 minutes is about enough to hit most of the net, | if you find holes in Apache and IIS that don't need manual tweaking, | and if you don't alert people by scribbling their pages with | "Hacked by Chinese" or "Reformatted by bin Laden" before you're done. | Our chief weapons are surprise, exponential growth and | dividing up target address space effectively, | with quick checks to make sure you don't waste time on infected machines, | and, purely optionally, an almost fanatical analysis of hosting center configs. Someone else (Staniford?) did a paer on flash worms, which add a pre-scan of the Internet for vulnerable machines, so that you start higher on the exponential curve. Its a good thing script kiddies don't read the literature. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume