30 seconds of virus hell that will change the web forever

NEWS A malicious virus similar to the Code Red worm could infect the entire internet, and would need just 30 seconds to do it. According to new research from US security consultancy Silicon Defense the web is vulnerable to a co-ordinated attack, which could reach every vulnerable web-server in the world in just half a minute. Silicon Defense says such a worm would, by necessity, be quite a simple program, limiting the amount of damage it could do to infected sites. However, it also notes that the Code Red worm was only 4kb. The threat is based on a dedicated attacker spending time crawling the web for vulnerable servers before releasing the worm, so that when sent it already knows what IP addresses to target. Silicon Defense declined to make any comment on the full impact of such a worm, saying only: "We have run out of hyperbolic adjectives to describe how seriously vulnerable the internet is to security disruptions, so we won't comment further on the social implications of this."