Worms - Worms are not virii.
- The name 'worm' was taken from The Shockwave Rider, a 1970s science fiction novel by John Brunner.
- They are self replicating pieces of code that by natures should contain no payload (although this is not *always* the case).
- The most famous worm of all time was the Robert Morris Jnr worm that exploited a buffer overflow in the UNIX Sendmail program. Due to which the speed of which worms create new instances of themselves if they stayed on a single host they would soon eat up all the resources, so they spread from computer to computer, network to network (unlike a virus which needs some sort of human intervention in order to spread).
- Because they can move so fast they often cause havoc, not due to malicious nature, but due to overload of mail server etc etc
- Most worms you will find written today are written in VBS (Visual Basic Script) and spread though Outlook. Recent high profile worms include LoveLetter and Life_Stages.
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