Internet Worms As Internet-wide Threat

A review article that does a decent job of introducing the worm research landscape. While certainly not complete, it's a good read.

A computer worm is a program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Because of the recursive structure of this propagation, the spread rate of worms is very fast and poses a big threat on the Internet infrastructure as a whole. Modern worms are capable of gaining control over a substantial portion of the Internet hosts within several minutes. No human mediated response is possible to stop an attack that is so rapid. Possible devastating effects on the Internet operation are hard to underestimate given that even traffic generated for the victim probes and worm propagation is so huge that it can be considered as a DDoS attack on the whole Internet and already used to bring down the Internet infrastructure of the whole countries. In this paper we present a survey of the existing worms and proposed methods of their containment.

Source: Internet Worms As Internet-wide Threat, Nikolai Joukov and Tzi-cker Chiueh.