A biological analogy................if there are 5 farmers living twenty miles apart and one contracts strep throat..............chances are the others won't?.......50,000 soldiers on an army camp an the MO will be quite busy?
Very good analogy nihil!! I like it.

You are right that with more targets connected together on faster communications systems there will of course be more infections occurring faster.

I think the thing that concerns me more than that is the fact that the timespan from vulnerability discovery to exploit code to worm is getting shorter and shorter. Slammer exploited a hole that was 6 months old. Blaster exploited a hole that was about 6 weeks old.

Patching is a full-time job and then some these days (maybe they should come out with a MCPI (Microsoft Certified Patch Implementer) certification- it would be a high-demand cert these days!!). When you have vulnerabilities coming out weekly and it takes a month to patch the tens of thousands of computers in your environment but the malicious coders of the world come out with an exploit worm in 2 weeks it poses a huge problem.

The other huge problem- which has been covered in other threads- is that security education is only half the battle. Even a well-educated and intelligent home user can not feasibly keep his system patched over a 56k dial-up connection. Windows 2000 SP4 is 130Mb- it would take more than 5 hours to download on an excellent, noise-free connection. Worms like Slammer and Blaster can infect a vulnerable machine in about 1 minute.

They need to come up with alternative means of distributing the patches like making them freely available on CD at Best Buy, CompUSA, Walmart, Blockbuster- anywhere that consumers can just go get the CD for free to patch their computer rather than trying to download it.

Anyway- kudos again on the great analogy!