Shortening the slow start phase in the propagation of active worms

Recently, active worms have done significant damages due to their rapid propagation over the Internet. This paper presents a study on strategies that future active worms might employ to shorten the slow start phase in their propagation. Our major contributions in this paper are first, we proposed two strategies to shorten a worm’s slow start phase in its propagation from the viewpoint of attackers; and second, we suggested a cost-effective hit-list size and average size of internally generated target lists based on our cost and benefit analysis. The research is very beneficial to understanding propagation mechanisms of active worms, and thus building effective defense systems against their propagation.