Target discovery schemes used by an internet worm

Worms are common phenomenon in today´s internet and cause tens of billions of dollars in damages to business around the world each year. In this study author first discuss about Worms, then gave a life-cycle of worm and a brief discussion about different stages of worm life cycle. Finally author gave a broad overview of target finding schemes (blind scan, hit-list and passive scheme) and finally made a comparison between various target finding schemes based on three parameters (no. of initially infected hosts, scan rate and hitting probability). This article explores all the current schemes used by internet worm to discover their victim host. This article is efficient both in research point of view as well as for the benefit of students because a vast list of target finding schemes used by worms discussed here.