A week after Slammer disrupted Net traffic and caused chaos on some corporate networks, the tech world managed to catch its breath and assess the damage caused by the lightning-fast worm. The worm infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable computers within 10 minutes, opening a new era of fast-spreading viruses on the Internet. The SQL Slammer worm–also known as Sapphire–doubled in size every 8.5 seconds when it first appeared, and reached the full rate at which it was scanning for vulnerable computers–a rate of more than 55 million scans per second–after about three minutes. This puts Slammer into the realm of what some researchers call a “Warhol” worm because it could infect the entire Internet within 15 minutes. Slammer’s spread was two orders of magnitude faster than Code Red, which infected 359,000 computers in the summer of 2001, and doubled in size about every 37 minutes. Full Story