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'Friendly' Worms Could Spread Software Fixes
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft researchers are working out the perfect strategies for worms to spread through networks. Their goal is to distribute software patches and other friendly information via virus, reducing load on servers. This raises the prospect of worm races — deploying a whitehat worm to spread a fix faster than a new attacking worm can reach vulnerable machines."
It's an interesting idea, but still causes some of the big collateral problems that worms cause. Welchia brought university and corporate networks to their knees because of high traffic just as well as Blaster did
You could program the worm to spread based on a random calculation, and assign it a threshold so the traffic isn't excessive. This would give the worm a very low probability to survive.
However, a better approach IMO would be to get rid of all the Genuine Advantage and activation crack, and allow boxes using old and famous activation keys (such as the "devil's own") to get updated with Windows Update.