Propagation of Active Worms: A Survey

This paper serves worm defenders' objective to improve their immunity to future active worms by giving them a deep insight into propagation characteristics of active worms from a worm authors' perspective. Active worms self-propagate across networks by employing scanning, pre-generated target list, or internally generated target lists as their target discovery technique. The authors find target acquisition and network reconnaissance actions during the network propagation phase in a worm's life cycle basically embody its target discovery technique. They derive the significance of target discovery techniques in shaping a worm's propagation characteristics from the life cycles of worms.