What is a worm?

Worms (worm) propagate specific information or errors through distributed networks, which in turn causes network services to be denied concurrent life and death locks.

In the 1982, Shock and Hupp the idea of a "worm" program based on a concept in the Shockwave Rider book.

This "worm" program resides in one or more machines and has the ability to automatically reposition (autorelocation). If it detects that a machine in the network is not occupied, it sends a copy of itself (a program segment) to that machine. Each piece of the program can relocate its copy to another machine and identify which machine it occupies.

The "worm" program is not necessarily harmful. This paper demonstrates that the worm program can be used as a diagnostic tool for Ethernet network devices, which detects the network quickly and effectively.

The worm consists of two parts: a main program and a bootstrapper. The main program, once built on the machine, collects information about other machines that are networked with the current machine. It can do this by reading the public profile and running the system utility that displays the current online status information. Subsequently, it attempts to build its bootstrapper on these remote machines using the flaws described above.

It is this little program, commonly called a boot program or a "fishing" program, that brings the worm into every machine it infects.