These newer worms that spread themselves over the net are really scary. No email, no action by the user required at all... the worm just finds computers on the net and off it goes. It spreads in seconds.
Fortunately, this one doesn't do any real damage. All it does, believe it or not, is to try to set up the victim computer as a spam server. Fortunately, that sort of thing is easy to block.
Someday somebody is gonna write the perfect worm. It will exploit an unknown and unpatched vulnerability in Windows, and/or Unix and/or Cisco routers. It will spread throughout the whole internet to almost every machine in a matter of only a few minutes. It will sit there and do absolutely nothing for a while, so that nobody catches on that anything is wrong. Then it will strike everywhere at the same moment. And it will take the Internet down in its entirety. For days.
Sounds like a good plot for a thriller novel! "Frederick Forsythe's Day of the Worm" :)
OK, now THAT thought is even scarier than The Ring. All the more so since you're probably right.
So far we seem to have missed the Botox worm, or whatever the name of the thing was. Last one to hit us bad was Nachi / Welchia, a few days after Blaster, which didn't affect us really at all. I'm keepin' my fingers crossed...