An Analytical Survey of Recent Worm Attacks

In this paper, I will present a broad overview of recent worm attacks starting from the year 2000 through 2011. Some of the most ‘notorious’ worms were discovered during this period including code red, slammer, and conficker. Though this paper does not contain any original research, it is meant to provide malware researchers with well-documented information of some worms that caused havoc during the said period. After sifting through thousands of entries on virus information repositories, I present, in this paper, only those that I considered novel in their approach, primarily from a technical perspective. As a summary to the paper, I have presented a broad overview of trends that I extracted from this raw data and also focussed on the ever increasing destructive potential of worms.