In the end, a design flaw in the worm's programming stymied the attack, but the potential threat of hundreds of thousands of servers flooding the wires with garbage data has resurrected concerns about security among those who consider themselves the guardians of the Internet. The Internet was lucky this time, as this particular Code Red program squandered its advantage and left itself vulnerable to security measures. That will not always be the case, said Vern Paxson, staff computer scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who analyzed Code Red's quick spread.

The internet is not invincible, and the larger, more complex, and more diversified it gets the more vulnerable it becomes to just a single clever guy working in his basement able to halt the entire thing. Did anyone take a look at those net weather reports while that virus was spreading? It was just a side effect of the virus that so many routers were junking out and lines getting flooded. Imagine what happens when someone actually puts the time into releasing a "net stopper" virus.