In April 2006, researchers from Secure Network and F-Secure published a report that warns of the large number of devices left in a visible state, and issued statistics on the spread of various Bluetooth services and the ease of spread of an eventual Bluetooth worm.

A computer worm is a standalone malware computer program that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers.

A " payload " is code in the worm designed to do more than spread the worm – it might delete files on a host system ( e. g., the ExploreZip worm ), encrypt files in a cryptoviral extortion attack, or send documents via e-mail.

In some cases, a user must open a document or program contained in an email message in order to spread the virus ; in others, notably the Kak worm, merely opening or previewing an email message itself will trigger the virus.

Later that year, the release by Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. of the so-called Morris worm provoked the popular media to spread this usage.

Software which is deliberately released as open source once experienced a security debacle in the late 1980s ; for example, the Morris worm of 1988 spread through some obscure — though widely visible to those who looked — vulnerabilities.

* The Register: " Vandals behind spread of Hybris worm named "

This level of replication proved excessive and the worm spread rapidly, infecting some computers multiple times.

The Morris worm, in 1988, exploited an overflow vulnerability in ( among others ) to spread.

The worm spread itself using a common type of vulnerability known as a buffer overflow.

* Animation showing the spread of the Code Red worm on 19 July 2001, by Jeff Brown, UCSD, and David Moore, CAIDA at SDSC

* November 2: The Morris worm, created by Robert Tappan Morris, infects DEC VAX and Sun machines running BSD UNIX connected to the Internet, and becomes the first worm to spread extensively " in the wild ", and one of the first well-known programs exploiting buffer overrun vulnerabilities.

* December 30: Kak worm is a Javascript computer worm that spread itself by exploiting a bug in Outlook Express.

* March 7: Mylife ( computer worm ) is a computer worm that spread itself by sending malicious emails to all the contacts in Microsoft Outlook.

The Blaster Worm ( also known as Lovsan, Lovesan or MSBlast ) was a computer worm that spread on computers running the Microsoft operating systems: Windows XP and Windows 2000, during August 2003.

Filtering by ISPs and widespread publicity about the worm curbed the spread of Blaster.

This allowed the worm to spread without users opening attachments simply by spamming itself to large numbers of random IP addresses.

This worm uses the backdoor left by Mydoom to spread.

Reduces losses from stomach, hookworm, and nodular worms by interfering with reproduction of the female worm by reducing the number of eggs laid and essentially rendering all laid eggs sterile.

BadTrans is a malicious Microsoft Windows computer worm distributed by e-mail.

Once executed, the worm replicates by sending copies of itself to other e-mail addresses found on the host's machine, and installs a keystroke logger, which then captures everything typed on the affected computer.

Vermicast, also known as worm castings, worm humus or worm manure, is the end-product of the breakdown of organic matter by species of earthworm.

However, as the Morris worm and Mydoom showed, even these " payload free " worms can cause major disruption by increasing network traffic and other unintended effects.

As mentioned in the article " The Enemy Within " by Mark Bowden, published in the June 2010 edition of The Atlantic, the Conficker Cabal is a team of specialists working to defeat the Conficker worm.

This device had the camera mounted on a vertical axis that could be rotated by a worm gear driven by turning a crank handle, and Paul put it on general sale the next year.

In the Book of Jonah a worm ( in Hebrew tola ' ath, " maggot ") bites the shade-giving plant's root causing it to wither, while in the epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh plucks his plant from the floor of the sea which he reached by tying stones to his feet.

According to Baba, each soul pursues conscious divinity by evolving: that is, experiencing form in seven " kingdoms " — stone / metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal, and human.

These are driven along a track by various means, from strings and pulleys, to worm gears or electromagnets.

The general opinion of the Rabbis is that Solomon hewed the stones by means of a shamir, a mythical worm whose mere touch cleft rocks.

God, in response to Isa's prayers, will kill them by sending a type of worm in the napes of their necks.

( Brunner invented the term " worm " for this program, as a self-replicating program that propagates across a computer network-the term " worm " was later adopted by computer researchers as the name for this type of program.

The worm is eventually activated, and the details of all the government's dark secrets ( clandestine genetic experimentation that produces crippled children, bribes and kickbacks from corporations, concealed crimes of high public officials ) now become accessible from anywhere on the network-in fact, those most affected by a particular crime of a government official are emailed the full details.

In place of the old system, Nick has designed the worm to enforce a kind of utilitarian socialism, with people's worth being defined by their roles in society, not their connections in high places.

Brunner's concept of the " computer worm " was inspired by analogy with the tapeworm, a digestive parasite.

* When a worm enters water ( either by falling off the island, through a hole in the bottom of it, or by the waterline being raised above the worm )

Additionally, the Morris worm worked by exploiting known vulnerabilities in Unix sendmail, finger, and rsh / rexec, as well as weak passwords.

* May 8: The Sadmind worm spreads by exploiting holes in both Sun Solaris and Microsoft IIS.

* August 12: The Blaster worm, aka the Lovesan worm, rapidly spreads by exploiting a vulnerability in system services present on Windows computers.

This worm was named Sasser because it spreads by exploiting a buffer overflow in the component known as LSASS ( Local Security Authority Subsystem Service ) on the affected operating systems.

This worm infected systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows system code ( TFTPD. EXE and TCP on ports 666-765, and a buffer overflow of the RPC on port 135 ).

Although titled " SQL slammer worm ", the program did not use the SQL language ; it exploited a buffer overflow bug in Microsoft's flagship SQL Server and Desktop Engine database products, for which a patch had been released six months earlier in MS02-039.

The worm was based on proof of concept code demonstrated at the Black Hat Briefings by David Litchfield, who had initially discovered the buffer overflow vulnerability that the worm exploited.

It did this by using a long string of the repeated character ' N ' to overflow a buffer, allowing the worm to execute arbitrary code and infect the machine.

Due to a buffer overflow, a vulnerable host interprets this string as computer instructions, propagating the worm.

* buffer overflows — this is how the Blaster worm was able to propagate