BAD HARDWARE WEEK

onficker also had an ingenious way of communicating with its creators. Every day, the worm came up with 250 meaningless strings of letters and attached a top-level domain name - a .com, .net, .org, .info or .biz - to the end of each to create a series of internet addresses, or URLs. Then the worm contacted these URLs. The worm's creators knew what each day's URLs would be, so they could register any one of them as a website at any time and leave new instructions for the worm there.