Or, "less commonly discussed". Why would worms be less prevalent today when the density of targets has increased one-hundred fold? Many systems may be inoculated but there are lots and lots of non-patched machines in the World.
In large part they are less common because of NAT's popularity.
Back in 2003, most people were on dialup or had a single machine plugged directly into the Internet. Microsoft had no firewall out of the box. So by default you exposed all your Microsoft networking services to the whole Internet.
NAT changed that, it made it so no one could directly connect to all the vulnerable machines floating around. Your phone is unable to infect other phones on your providers network or the wider internet in this same way.
No one is out mass exploiting those IOT light bulbs with default telnet passwords because they're not exposed directly to the Internet. There are a few however exploiting vulnerable NAT routers... probably the only sort of worm to see widespread success in recent years.
Exactly this. MSBlast was so prevalent that ISP's would prevent infected computers from accessing the internet, by redirecting them to a page which described how they could remove the infection and patch themselves up.
I don't remember that happening with any other type of infection.
And I don't think we'll ever see that again. Even if there are big vulnerabilities in Linksys, DLink, Netgear or common ISP shipped modem/router combos - there are just too many different devices to see it on the same scale.
