transcription, транскрипция: [ wə:m ]
noun (Science and Technology) A computer program which (like a virus) is designed to sabotage a computer or network of computers and can replicate itself without first being incorporated into another program (compare Trojan). Etymology: So called because it operates like a parasitic worm in an animal host; it can worm its way into a network without first having to be copied into another program, breeds extra segments, and cannot easily be killed off. History and Usage: The concept was invented by John Brunner in the science fiction novel The Shockwave Rider in 1975; his worm is the computing equivalent of a parasitic tapeworm, generating new segments for itself in all the machines of a network and therefore unstoppable. In the novel he uses the word worm interchangeably with tapeworm: Am I right in thinking Hearing Aid is defended by a tapeworm?...If I'd had to tackle the job...I'd have written the worm as an explosive scrambler, probably about half a million bits long, with a backup virus facility and a last-ditch infinitely replicating tail. It should just about have been possible to hang that sort of tail on a worm by 2005. Although this type of program was beyond the capability of programmers at the time, a group of research scientists at the Rank Xerox laboratories in Palo Alto, California, attempted to develop a set of benign worm programs in the early eighties as a means of distributing computing operations across a number of different machines in a network, with the program finding spare computing capacity for itself and copying the necessary segment on to any machine that it was going to use. What really brought the worm into the news, though, was the worm which temporarily disabled more than three thousand computers at universities, businesses, and research establishments on the Internet network in the US in November 1988. Robert T. Morris, a research student at Cornell University, was later convicted of releasing the worm into the system. One year after an Ivy League graduate student unleashed a computer 'worm' that brought a national scientific and defense computer network to its knees for a day, experts say the threat of computer worms and viruses is greater than ever. Boston Globe 30 Oct. 1989, p. 29 About 180 companies in the U.S. market offer services and software to stymie worms and viruses, which can alter or destroy data in a corporation's information systems. American Banker 1 Aug. 1990, p. 10