In Pictures: 20 notorious worms, viruses and botnets

The earliest worms and viruses were created for geeky fun and did little harm - oh, how times have changed. Here are 20 worms, viruses and botnets that show the evolution of malware, from Creeper to Flame.

By Joan Goodchild

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Code Red

In 2001, Code Red infected Web servers, where it automatically spread by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft IIS servers, says Lovet.

"In less than one week, nearly 400,000 servers were infected, and the homepage of their hosted Websites was replaced with 'Hacked By Chinese!'"

Lovet also notes Code Red had a distinguishing feature designed to flood the White House Website with traffic from the infected servers, probably making it the first case of documented hacktivism on a large scale.

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