:: Deepquest ::

Slammer started to spread on january 25 05:30 UTC.
More than 75,000 hosts were infected. It’s the first time that a virus caused network outages, canceled airline flights, interference with elections, and ATM failures.

Here is a geographic spread of Sapphire in the 30 minutes after release:
By comparison, it was two orders magnitude faster than the Code Red worm, which infected over 359,000 hosts on July 19th, 2001.
The idea of the Sapphire worm was not only to cause damage to ms sql serves but rather overload networks and then taking Ms SQL servers out of operation.
Facts:
-Sapphire reached its peak scanning rate of over 55 million scans per second across the Internet in under 3 minutes.
-90 percent of the entire Internet scanned in a little more than 10 minutes.
-74,856 IP addresses infected.
-US$1.2 billion in lost productivity in its first five days worldwide.

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