A worst-case worm attack on the U.S. could easily cost the country $50 billion in direct damages, a pair of security experts said Friday. Nicholas Weaver and Vern Paxson, two security researchers who work with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), a nonprofit research group associated with the University of California at Berkeley, modeled a worst-case scenario in which state-sponsored attackers construct a worm exploiting an unpublished vulnerability, then launch it over the Internet. Weaver is a postdoctoral researcher at ICSI, while Paxson is also a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Although our estimates are at best approximations, a plausible worst-case worm could cause $50 billion or more in direct economic damage by attacking widely used services in Microsoft Windows and carrying a highly destructive payload,” said Weaver and Paxson in their paper. Full Story