Computer-science researchers are predicting that new types of dangerous worms are on their way with the ability to infect Web servers, browsers and other software so quickly that the Internet could be taken down in a matter of minutes.

Although still very much a theoretical threat, the killer worms described in the research study "How to Own the Internet in Your Spare Time," are triggering some skepticism - but the idea of them is seldom dismissed as outlandish science fiction.

The authors of the research present a vision of the future where worm-based attacks use hit lists to target vulnerable Internet hosts and equipment, such as routers, rather than scanning aimlessly as the last mammoth worm outbreaks, Nimda and Code Red, did last year. And this new breed of worm will carry dangerous payloads to allow automated denial-of-service and file destruction through remote control.

"Code Red and Nimda could have spread faster, and they didn't have powerful payloads," says Stuart Staniford, president of Silicon Defense and co-author of the research paper detailing the killer worms. The paper was published with two Berkeley, Calif., scientists, Vern Paxson and Nicholas Weaver. Weaver is a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, and Paxson is staff scientist at the ICSI Center for Internet Research in Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's network research group.

In "How to Own the Internet in Your Spare Time," the three say that this next generation of computer worms - which certainly would have military application during war - will carry knowledge about a specific server's vulnerability and propagate at a breathtakingly high rate of infection, "so that no human-mediated counter-response is possible."

Remedying software vulnerabilities remains a huge problem, with many corporations saying it takes about a day or two - at best - to apply software patches once a software vendor has acknowledged a vulnerability in product coding and supplied a fix for it. And online home computer users are often wholly unaware of these types of problems.

Staniford says they tested the paper's thesis in a lab simulation of a computer worm designed to subvert 10 million Internet hosts over low-speed and high-speed lines. Supplied with its own hit list of IP addresses and vulnerabilities gained through previous scanning, the theoretical worm could infect more than 9 million servers in about 15 minutes. They called this the Warhol worm after artist Andy Warhol's quote that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. A similar theoretical worm they coined the Flash worm, blasted out from a 622M bit/sec link, would take even less time to "own" the Internet.

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