Unlike worms, wabbits do not use network functionality in order to spread to other computers.
The concept may have descended from a program called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 55000 at the University of Washington Computer Center.
Wabbits can be programmed to have (sometimes malicious) side effects in addition to the direct consequences of their quick self-replication.
An example of a simple wabbit is a fork bomb. The fork bomb is a form of denial-of-service attack against a computer system that uses the fork function. Fork bomb works quickly creating a large number of processes to saturated the available processing space in the computer’s operating system.
Running processes can be ‘forked’ to create other running processes and so on. The program would allegedly make two copies of itself every time it was run eventually crashing the system.
It relies on the assumption that the number of programs and processes that may be simultaneously executed on a computer has a limit.
What is wabbits?
