A Worst-Case Worm

Short Description
that a plausible worst-case worm could cause $50 billion. or more in direct economic damage by … ment: we analyze the worst worm incident that is in our …

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A Worst-Case Worm
Nicholas Weaver Vern Paxson
International Computer Science Institute International Computer Science Institute
nweaver@icsi.berkeley.edu vern@icir.org
June 8, 2004
Abstract
Worms represent a substantial economic threat to the U.S.
computing infrastructure. An important question is how
much damage might be caused, as this figure can serve
as a guide to evaluating how much to spend on defenses.
We construct a parameterized worst-case analysis based
on a simple damage model, combined with our understanding
of what an attack could accomplish. Although
our estimates are at best approximations, we speculate
that a plausible worst-case worm could cause $50 billion
or more in direct economic damage by attacking widelyused
services in MicrosoftWindows and carrying a highly
destructive payload.
1 Introduction
Worms-malicious, self-propagating network
programs-represent a substantial threat to the U.S.
computing infrastructure, as they are capable of spreading
substantially faster than humans can respond
[22, 16, 14] and can contain highly malicious payloads
[15, 26]. Since the development of automated systems
designed to stop new worms represents a substantial
investment in research and deployment, it is useful to
An earlier version of this work…