The use of self-propagating programs for legitimate purposes is one of those ideas that just refuses to die.
In the 1978, researchers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)created worms that performed tasks that included system monitoring andwake up calls. However, in one case, the Xerox PARC ‘good’ worms thatwere supposed to run on a small set of machines, instead replicateduncontrollably across the network and started crashing machines.Fortunately, the Xerox PARC researchers had an independent terminationmechanism in the worm that enabled them to kill all copies of the wormon the network. Unfortunately, they still had 100 dead machines.
Since then, others have proposed using ‘good’ worms for purposessuch as compressing all files on a network, battling against ‘evil’worms, patching vulnerabilities, and looking for ways around Internetcensorship systems.
Unfortunately, people occasionally put these theories into practice.
