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The name 'worm' was taken from The Shockwave Rider, a 1970s science fiction novel by John Brunner. Researchers writing an early paper on experiments in distributed computing noted the similarities between their software and the program described by Brunner and adopted the name.
The first implementation of a worm was by two researchers at Xerox PARC in 1978. [1]
The first worm to attract wide attention, the Morris worm, was written by Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. at the MIT Artificial intelligence Laboratory. It was released on November 2, 1988, and quickly infected a great many computers on the Internet at the time. It propagated through a number of bugs in BSD UnixUNIX (or Unix is a portable, multi-task and multi-user computer operating system originally developed by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. Unices The term Unices includes Unix and Unix-like ope and its derivatives. Morris himself was convicted under the US Computer Crime and Abuse Act and received 3 years' probation, community service and a fine in excess of $10,000.
In addition to replication, a worm may be designed to do any number of things, such as delete files on a host system or send documents via email. More recent worms may be multi-headedMulti-headed can refer to Multi-headed trains, where two or more engines are used A computer with two or more monitors attached. A computer worm with two or more payloads. and carry other executables as a payloadIn cargo transport, payload is the valuable contents of the vehicle. Similarly, in military aircraft, payload is the carrying capacity of an aircraft, whether as cargo, munitions, or external fuel, although internal fuel is usually not included. See also. However, even in the absence of such a payload, a worm can wreak havoc just with the network traffic generated by its reproduction. MydoomMydoom also known as Novarg Mimail. R and Shimgapi is a computer worm affecting Microsoft Windows. It was first sighted on January 26, 2004. It became the fastest spreading email worm ever (as of January 2004), exceeding previous records set by the Sobig, for example, caused a noticeable worldwide Internet slowdown at the peak of its spread.
A common payload is for a worm to install a backdoorA backdoor in a computer system (or a cryptosystem, or even in an algorithm) is a method of bypassing normal authentication or obtaining remote access to a computer, while intended to remain hidden to casual inspection. The backdoor may take the form of a in the infected computer, as was done by Sobig and MydoomMydoom also known as Novarg Mimail. R and Shimgapi is a computer worm affecting Microsoft Windows. It was first sighted on January 26, 2004. It became the fastest spreading email worm ever (as of January 2004), exceeding previous records set by the Sobig. These zombie computers are used by spam senders for sending junk email or to cloak their website's address.[2] Spammers are thought to pay for the creation of such worms [3] [4], and worm writers have been caught selling lists of IP addresses of infected machines.[5] Others try to blackmail companies with threatened DDOS attacks.[6] The backdoors can also be exploited by other worms, such as Doomjuice, which spreads using the backdoor opened by Mydoom.
Whether worms can be useful is a common theoretical question in computer science and artificial intelligence. The Nachi family of worms, for example, tried to download then install patches from Microsoft's website to fix various vulnerabilities in the host system (the same vulnerabilities that they exploited). This eventually made the systems affected more secure, but generated considerable network traffic — often more than the worms they were protecting against — rebooted the machine in the course of patching it, and, maybe most importantly, did its work without the explicit consent of the computer's owner or user. As such, most security experts deprecate worms, whatever their payload.