Killer worms

As you have no doubt been following yesterdays narrowly averted Internet tragedy, you may find a paper entitled "How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time" quite interesting. It was written by the UC Berkeley's Nicholas Weaver, Stuart Staniford from Silicon Defense and Vern Paxson from the ICSI Center for Internet Research. Using recent worms such as Code Red Nimda as a starting point, the three authors have built a mathematical model predicting Internet attacks that take as little as an hour to propagate throughout the Internet and remain endemic, posing a very quick and very permanent threat. Crazy Stuff. But what I found most interesting about the paper was it's call for a a "Cyber "Center for Disease Control"

Given the magnitude of Internet-scale threats as developed in the previous sections, we believe it is imperative for the Internet in general, and for nations concerned with cyberwarfare in particular, to attempt to counter the immense risk.

Perhaps it's time for a little government re-intervention.