Is A “Friendly” Worm In The Future

By Lashan Clarke

The report entitled, “Sampling Strategies for Epidemic-Style Information Dissemination”, was released this week detailing the most effective way to ensure that users updated their software and applied the necessary security patches.

The report was written by Milan Vojnovic of Microsoft Research who proposes that a “friendly” worm be used to do these tasks. This would be a worm or software that would be spread to make sure that software was patched quickly, and made available on the Internet.

Even though this sounds like a good idea, it was quickly “squashed” as the source code could be changed by hackers to create more damage than was intended.