The link leads to current and ongoing research at UC Berkeley about optimizing the speed that worms take to span the Internet as fast as theoretically possible. What are the known theoretical limits? Read on.

It is well known that active worms such as Code Red and the Morris internet worm have the potential to spread very quickly, on the order of hours to days. But it is possible to construct hyper-virulent active worms, capable of infecting all vulnerable hosts in approximately 15 minutes to an hour. Such 'Warhol Worms', by using optimized scanning routines, hitlist scanning for initial propagation, and permutation scanning for complete, self coordinated coverage, could cause maximum damage before people could respond. The potential mayhem is staggering.

CLB: We're approaching the Warhol limit in 2004. Pleas set up automatic patching on your computers and networks.