SQL Slammer: 90% of vulnerable servers in 1st 10 minutes. Yikes!
The SQL Slammer worm, at 376 bytes of computer code, is much smaller than either Code Red’s estimated 4KB (4,096 bytes) or Nimda’s 60KB (61,440 bytes). Exploiting a hole that had been announced and patched by Microsoft six months earlier to the day, the worm inundated other computers on the Internet with a copy of itself. The worm’s small size meant that it could send itself out in a single data package, or packet, that automatically infected the victim by loading Slammer into memory.
That efficiency made Slammer the fastest-spreading worm to date, infecting 90 percent of all vulnerable servers in its first 10 minutes, according to a report by a coalition of researchers from University of California San Diego, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and Silicon Defense, a security consultancy.
