If Slammer’s weekend assault had come just 48 hours later, the end result might have been a virtual Net shutdown. Institutional investors unable to make trades could have lost billions of dollars. While the chaos caused by the Slammer worm on Saturday, Jan. 25 has subsided, the tiny program that gummed up the Internet leaves some painful insights into the immense damage a voracious invader can inflict — not only on its direct targets but to secondary ones as well. Above all, Slammer, which infected the ubiquitous Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) database software used to manage corporate information, was a further demonstration of just how vulnerable the Internet remains. Full Story