Despite infecting tens of thousands of computers worldwide, the recent W32.Blaster worm is poorly written and inefficient, blunting its impact, according to security experts.

However, future versions of the worm could correct Blaster's flaws and spread much more quickly, resulting in service outages on infected networks and causing far greater harm to businesses and individuals users on the Internet, experts warn.

Blaster, which is also known as the MSBlast, the Lovsan Worm and the DCOM Worm, surfaced on Monday and quickly spread to computers worldwide by exploiting a known security vulnerability in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

By Tuesday morning, the worm, which targets a Windows component for handling RPC (Remote Procedure Call) protocol traffic called the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) interface, spread to more than 30,000 systems, according to Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer of the SANS Internet Storm Center.

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