The word ‘Nimda’ may not be the most well remembered in the cyber-crime hall of fame but as malicious worm outbreaks go, Nimda certainly contributed to the malware landscape and was able to cause havoc on 18 September, 10 years ago in 2001.

Long before cloud based security services were the norm and virus scanning was only performed once a week, the Nimda worm was effectively unleashed onto the global computer network exactly a week after the 9/11 atrocities. Because of this timing, some media quickly began speculating a link between the worm and Al Qaeda, although this rumour was quickly quashed by the FBI, but it did highlight the fact that cyber warfare can be a real threat carefully orchestrated by sophisticated cyber gangs or even terrorists and not script kiddies tucked away in dormitories.

The Nimda worm came hot on the heels of the “Code Red” scare in August 2001, when a variant of the original worm infected more than 250,000 machines...