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Computer experts called 2003 'the Year of the Worm'. For 12 months, digital infections swarmed across the internet with the intensity of a biblical plague. It began in January, when the Slammer worm infected nearly 75,000 servers in 10 minutes, clogging cashpoint networks and causing sporadic flight delays. In the summer, the Blaster worm struck, spreading by exploiting a flaw in Windows; it carried taunting messages directed at Bill Gates, infected hundreds of thousands of computers and tried to use them to bombard a Microsoft website with data.
Then in August, a worm called Sobig.F exploded with even more force, spreading via email that it generated by stealing addresses from victims' computers. It propagated so rapidly that at one point, one out of every 17 email messages travelling through the internet was a copy of Sobig.F. The computer security firm mi2g estimated that the worldwide cost of these attacks in 2003, including clean-up and lost productivity, was at least $82 billion (though such estimates have been criticised for being inflated).