Hi, Actually, you'd be suprised, the object of the excercise is notoriety and control, if you nuke the machine, you don't get to travel... QED The same can be said of the syn flood bots, that are used to nuke places like yahoo and amazon, the whole point of those is to spread quitely to make use of the machine without drawing attention to the perp :) Personally having been a reader of 40Hex in the past, I have to say that I do admire a well written virus. As a pure expression of programming prowess some of them are amazing! Dark angel used to produce some killer code, then the state of the art moved on to include polymorhic shielding, encryption, etc. all in a sub 3K package, designed to "live thrive and survive" totally autonomous, in a hostile environment, on almost any kind of PC hardware, these things are works of art. Sadly the same cannot be said for the current crop of virii making the papers, these "programs" (and I use the word advisedly :) that make use of well documented holes in application programs, are crap. They're are nothing better than glorified scripts. Lets face it, if outlook or IIS were better programs with a more coherent security model we wouldn't be having this conversation :) Right, I shall now go and ramble at length elsewhere :) later jb