Once again, it appears that the worm authors had caught system administrators with their trousers down. Despite the availability of a patch since mid-July to fix the vulnerability exploited by W32.Blaster, the widespread infection of both business and home computers showed that in the vast majority of cases, it had not been applied. Such was the infection rate that, at its pinnacle, the worm was taking only 30 seconds to find an uninfected computer somewhere in the world.The single, hard and irrefutable fact is that if all the infected computers had applied a patch freely available from Microsoft weeks before its release into the wild, W32.Blaster would have failed completely and utterly. However, the worm's authors knew that the patch would not have been applied in the vast majority of cases, and wrote and released the worm. Which poses the question - after worldwide calamities such as CodeRed and Nimda, why were lessons not learned in order to protect computers against the rapid spread of such a malignant terror?
Luckily, W32.Blaster was not nearly as devastating as it could have been. Inherent flaws within its design prevented it replicating more rapidly, such as requiring two separate connections to the Internet to start infecting its host, and the sequential scanning method it used to find new hosts to infect. Other than implementing a partial Denial of Service (DoS) attack on its host, the network to which it was attached and potentially the Windows Update website, it did not attempt to delete or corrupt any user data. Being relatively benign, anti-virus vendors were confident enough to provide "clean-up kits" for infected machines, which remove the worm and returned the computer back to normal - the electronic equivalent of a couple of aspirin, a hot bath and an early-to-bed.Nevertheless, as bad as the infection from W32.Blaster was, it could have been a lot worse. Had the worm functioned in the same way as CodeRed, causing destruction of data and utilising a single connection for infection, download and propagation, or like Nimda used both web and e-mail to distribute itself, the infection rate and the consequences of being infected would have been a lot worse. These are salient facts, which have no doubt not escaped the wily attention of the copycat virus writers.