Bruce Schneier (author of Beyond Fear) speculates that the great August blackout on the East Coast may have been caused by the Blaster worm.
Although the worm didn't have to perform any malicious actions on the computers it infected, its mere existence drained resources and often caused the host computer to crash. To remove the worm, a system administrator had to run a program that erased the malicious code; then, the administrator had to patch the vulnerability so that the computer would not get reinfected.
The coincidence is too obvious to ignore. At 2:14 p.m. EDT, the MSBlast worm was dropping systems all across North America. The report doesn't explain why so many computers–both primary and backup systems–at FirstEnergy were failing at around the same time. But MSBlast is certainly a reasonable suspect.
