Intelligent Worms: Searching for Preys

Another paper showing why, at least in theory, a worm that has some roadmap about its victims should be more efficient than one that blindly looks for victims.

Internet worms have been a persistent security threat in recent years since the Morris worm arose in 1988. After the Code Red and Nimda worms were released into the Internet in 2001, the Slammer worm was unleashed with a 376-byte User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packet and infected at least 160,000 computers worldwide on January 25, 2003. Later, the Blaster and Witty worms flooded the Internet in 2003 and 2004, respectively. These active worms caused large parts of the Internet to be temporarily inaccessible, costing both public and private sectors millions of dollars. The frequency and virulence of active-worm outbreaks have been increasing dramatically in the last few years, presenting a significant threat to today's Internet. In this article, we review the prey-searching methods that worms use currently, and may potentially exploit in the future. While reviewing what has been used by worms is doable, predicting what worms may use seems to be prohibitive: There would be million ways for active worms to attack the Internet. We show how mathematics has been playing an important role in providing both a guidance and methodology in studying current and futuristic worm attacks. In particular, we outline how mathematical tools (e.g., epidemic model, statistics, machine learning, and game theory) can be applied in this area.

Source: Intelligent Worms: Searching for Preys, by Zesheng Chen and Chuanyi Ji.