In September 2003, Jeffrey Lee Parson, an 18-year-old from Hopkins, Minnesota, was indicted for creating the B variant of the Blaster worm; he admitted responsibility and was sentenced to an 18-month prison term in January 2005.

[4] The worm spreads by exploiting a buffer overflow discovered by the Polish security research group Last Stage of Delirium[5] in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026[6] (CVE-2003-0352) and later in MS03-039.

[7] This allowed the worm to spread without users opening attachments simply by spamming itself to large numbers of random IP addresses.

[9] The worm was programmed to start a SYN flood against port 80 of windowsupdate.com if the system date is after August 15 and before December 31 and after the 15th day of other months, thereby creating a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against the site.

[26] When infection occurs, the buffer overflow causes the RPC service to crash, leading Windows to display the following message and then automatically reboot, usually after 60 seconds.

Windows must now restart because the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Service terminated unexpectedly.This was the first indication many users had an infection; it often occurred a few minutes after every startup on compromised machines.