Nicholas Weaver
More info
- Affiliation
- ICSI, UC Berkeley
- Known for
- Worm analysis, the Warhol worm
ICSI researcher who calculated how quickly a worm could take over the internet — and then watched Slammer do it.
In "How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time" (2002, with Stuart Staniford and Vern Paxson), Weaver described a "Warhol worm" that, armed with a pre-built hit list, could infect every vulnerable host within fifteen minutes. The following year SQL Slammer saturated its target population in about ten. Weaver co-authored "Inside the Slammer Worm" with, among others, Stefan Savage.
He later became a prolific public explainer: after the Snowden leaks he laid out the mechanics of the NSA's QUANTUM packet injection, and he is one of the most outspoken critics of cryptocurrency, which he describes, without much diplomacy, as a solution to the wrong problem.