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Fighting Internet Worms With Honeypots

Summer 2003 will sadly remain famous for netsurfers because of the propagation of an Internet worm known as MSBlast, which infected millions of hosts running Microsoft Windows. This event is far from unique; other worms such as Slammer, Code Red, Nimda have similarly wreaked havoc in the past. The goal of these roaming computer entities is to autonomously reproduce themselves on every reachable system on the Internet, resulting in ongoing problems with computer security. The human tendency to use the same types of systems and applications, correlated to a kind of Darwinism theory for computer “monoculture”, could have some security experts fear the widespread destruction of a given family of systems connected to Internet if an especially malicious new Internet worm were to appear. What would have happened if the recent worm MSBlast had formatted the hard drives of millions of infected Windows machines? It didn’t, but it could have very easily. As computer attacks evolve, new responses are essential. Full Story