"Arguably the biggest threat the Internet faces today is the propagation of a big worm," Timothy Mullen, chief information officer of AnchorIS, based in Charleston, South Carolina.

Worms are a form of self-propagating virus that once set in motion can wreak havoc by taking control of other machines and then use these to launch attacks on the wider Internet.

"The next worm is going to happen, and it's going to be worse," Mullen said at the annual DefCon hacker conference.

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