[Westwales] Made me laugh

[Simon Burns]

I have to question this one:

> "The Sapphire Worm was the fastest computer worm in history. As it began
> spreading throughout the Internet, it doubled in size every 8.5 seconds.
> It infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable hosts within 10 minutes."

So after 3 minutes it had infected over 1 million hosts, right? And in 5 
minutes, over 34 billion hosts? *Any* statistic which freely quotes 
anything on an exponential growth rate has to be questioned *8)

8.5 seconds = 1 host
102 seconds = 2048 hosts
153 seconds = 131072
212 seconds = 16,777,216 hosts ...

Maybe it doubled in size for a couple of minutes, then slowed down. Tell
me I've miscalculated somewhere, I never was sure about this maths thingy
(but I'm always suspicious of anti-virus/security vendors' wild-eyed
claims about the dangers they've spared us from ;-)

I note that the link you give for the quote says the worm stopped at about 
75,000 hosts, presumably after 150 seconds or thereabouts....

Seriously, I could well be wrong but I suspect they are :-)

--
Simon