About a month, yes In that case, it was supposedly because of the patch: > According to court papers, the original Blaster was created after security research

About a month, yes In that case, it was supposedly because of the patch: > According to court papers, the original Blaster was created after security researchers from the Chinese group Xfocus reverse engineered the original Microsoft patch that allowed for execution of the attack The patch was ms03-026: Buffer Overrun In RPC Interface Could Allow Code Execution Published: July 16, 2003 (could, hah) > The worm was first noticed and started spreading on August 11, 2003 It was a huge problem at college campuses well into September. Students would arrive with their brand new laptops running XP and get hit with the worm 30 seconds after connecting to the network. Really the main difference is blaster was just an annoyance and mostly just broke random things like the DHCP service, but was easily fixed.