The Internet is crucial to business, government, education and many other facets of society and its continuing scalability places serious challenges on the routing system's capability to produce a stable view of the overall network reachability. Several global-scale Internet failures driven by the uncontrollable spreading of self-propagating code exploiting homogeneous security vulnerabilities have led the popular press to predict the imminent death of the Internet. The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in the frequency and virulence of such "internet worm" outbreaks infecting hundreds of thousands of Internet hosts in a very short period and sometimes disrupting the connectivity of some large sections of the Internet with significant damages in network stability. Although the predicted Internet col-lapse has yet to materialize, further analysis of the behavior and characteristics of wide-area network dynamics during these events is critical for the evolution...