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A worm is a process that uses the spawn mechanism to clobber system performance.The worm spawns copies of itself, using up system resources and perhaps locking out system use by all other processes. On computer networks, worms are particularly potent, since they may reproduce themselves among systems and thus shut down the entire network.Such an event occured in 1988 to UNIX systems on the Internet, causing millions of dollars of lost system and programmer time.
At the close of the workday on November 2,1988, Robert Morris, a first-year student unleashed a worm program on one or more hosts connected to the Internet. Targetting Sun Microsystems Sun 3 workstations and VAX computers running variants of Version 4 BSD UNIX, the worm quickly spread over great distances; within a few hours of its release, it had consumed system resources to the point of bringing down the infected machines.
