Biography of a Worm

In the November issue of PC World magazine is an article on the Sasser worm, which made it's debut in May, 2004:

Who created Sasser? The short answer is a malicious hacker. But Sasser is also the by-product of the very system that's supposed to protect computer users. The hole Sasser wriggles through was discovered by an employee at a California security firm. And in releasing a patch for the hole, Microsoft supplied hackers worldwide with all the technical data they needed to exploit it. In short, you have to wonder whether this cure is worse than the disease.

Source: Biography of a Worm, Dan Verton. From the November 2004 issue of PC World magazine.

A decently written piece that covers various players involved in the Sasser worm, from the hole's discovery by eEye (featuring a friend of a friend in the article) to the Microsoft security response team to the virus analysts at F-Secure through to the arrest of the Sasser author in Germany. A neat piece covering the timelime of the worm. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to place as much attention on the analysis of the network traffic caused by the worm, perhaps because it wasn't nearly as the Blaster worm's impact in August, 2003.