Microsoft is moving to counter some scathing comments regarding a security paper authored by researchers at its Cambridge, England, facility. The paper, "Sampling Strategies for Epidemic-Style Information Dissemination," looks at how worms sometimes inefficiently spread their code.
The research explores how a more efficient method could, for example, be used for distributing patches or other software. The advantage would be that patches could be distributed from PC to PC, rather than from a central server. That method would reduce the load on a server, and patches would be distributed faster. But the patches would have the same qualities as a computer worm, a generally malicious file.