Slammer - technical definition

A worm that caused a billion dollars worth of damage on the Internet on January 25, 2003. Slammer infected computers all over the Internet by generating random IP addresses and causing the computer's buffer to overflow with its own instructions that replicate itself and start the process all over again.

Within three minutes after the first Slammer packet was unleashed, the number of infected computers was doubling every eight seconds. Within 15 minutes, large sections of the Net were overloaded and out of commission. See buffer overflow.