"On July 19, the Code Red worm infected more than 250,000
systems in just 9 hours. The worm scanned the Internet,
identified vulnerable systems, and infected those systems by
installing itself. Each newly installed worm joined all the
others which caused the rate of scanning to grow rapidly. This
uncontrolled growth in scanning directly decreased the speed of
the Internet and caused sporadic but widespread outages among
all types of systems." --
National Infrastructure Protection Center, ALERT 01--016,
"Code Red Worm"
