Its most obvious characteristics were familiar at a glance. If the typical inflow of infection was like a steady drip from a tap, this new strain seemed shot out of a fire hose. The worm was spreading exponentially, crowding in so fast that it shouldered aside all the ordinary daily fare. By then, very little else was showing on the infections log. By Friday morning, Phil's colleague Vinod Yegneswaran notified him that their honeynet was under significant attack. After that first infection at 5:20pm on Thursday 20 November 2008, there came a few classic bits of malware and then the newcomer again. The new arrival in Phil's honeynet was clearly a worm, and it began to attract the Tribe's attention immediately. A worm, on the other hand, is state of the art. To invade a computer, a virus relies on human help such as clicking unadvisedly on an unsolicited email attachment, or inserting an infected floppy disk or thumb drive into a vulnerable computer. For the purposes of this story, the difference between a "virus" and a "worm" is in the way each spreads. The overarching term "malware" refers to any programme that infects a computer and operates without the user's consent.
![internet worm virus internet worm virus](https://www.kaspersky.com/content/en-global/images/repository/pr/maldal_mail.gif)
Normal folk tend to use the terms "virus" and "worm" interchangeably, while the "Geek Tribe" defines them differently. So Phil can set up the equivalent of a computer network that exists entirely within the confines of his digital ranch. These are not physical machines, just individual operating systems within the large computer that mimic the functions of distinct, small ones. It is thus an inviting target for every free-roaming strain of malware trolling cyberspace. He sees the internet not in some vague sense, but as something very real, comprehensible and alarmingly fragile.īy design, a portion of the virtual ranch he surveys is left unfenced and undefended. Inside the very large computer he gets to play with, Porras creates a network of "virtual computers". And it contains not just a voice or picture, but… the whole world and everything in it: pictures, sounds, text, movies, maps, art, propaganda, music, news, games, mail, whole national libraries, books, magazines, newspapers, sex, along with close-up pictures of Mars and Jupiter, your long-forgotten great-aunt Margaret, the menu at your local Thai restaurant, everything you ever heard of and plenty you had not ever dreamed about, all of it just waiting to be plucked out of thin air.īehind his array of three monitors at the headquarters of SRI International in Menlo Park in California, Phil Porras occupies a desk in the birthplace of this marvel.
![internet worm virus internet worm virus](https://www.reveantivirus.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/worm.jpg)
No waves – at least, none of the kind readily understood. It is all around us, like the old idea of luminiferous ether. There was something going on there you could picture, even if falsely. Or TV… well, nobody understood that, except that it was like the damn radio only the waves were more complex and hence delivered pictures, too. Nobody knew how that worked, but you could picture invisible waves of electromagnetic particles arriving from the distance like the surf. It's nebulous in a deeper way than previous leaps in home technology. E ven though it has become a part of daily life, the internet itself remains a cloudy idea to most people.