Two Years Later, Blaster Worm Still Squirming
More than two years after Blaster turned the summer of 2003 into an IT administrator's worst nightmare, the worm is still very much alive and there are fears within Microsoft that thousands of Windows machines will never be completely dewormed. According to statistics culled from Microsoft's Windows malicious software removal tool, between 500 and 800 copies of Blaster are removed from Windows machines per day.
"The continued prevalence of [Blaster] is likely due to infected computers which, for one reason or another, will never be updated or disinfected. These computers will serve as eternal carriers for the worm," says Matthew Braverman, a program manager in Microsoft's Anti-Malware Engineering Team, the unit at Redmond responsible for updating the free worm-zapping tool.
