Has anyone besides RTM ever successfully dropped the majority of the network?
The key was that the attack happened over UDP which meant that there was no handshake, no congestion control, no need to worry about dropped packets, etc. The only limitation was the bandwidth of the infected host -- the virus itself was less than 500 bytes (not kilo, just straight bytes) so a single host could infect tens of millions of computers.
It was a pretty fascination piece of malware.