This is the first book focused exclusively on Internet worms, offering you solid worm detection and mitigation strategies for your work in the field. This ground-breaking volume enables you to put rising worm trends into perspective with practical information in detection and defense techniques utilizing data from live networks, real IP addresses, and commercial tools. The book helps you understand the classifications and groupings of worms, and offers a deeper understanding of how they threaten network and system security.

After examining how a worm is constructed and how its major life cycle steps are implemented, the book scrutinizes targets that worms have attacked over the years, and the likely targets of the immediate future. Moreover, this unique reference explains how to detect worms using a variety of mechanisms, and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of three approaches—traffic analysis, honeypots and dark network monitors, and signature analysis. The book concludes with a discussion of four effective defenses against network worms, including host-based defenses, network firewalls and filters, application layer proxies, and a direct attack on the worm network itself.