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Morris Worm Turning 20
netbuzz writes "The Internet will mark an infamous anniversary Sunday, when the Morris worm turns 20. Considered the first major attack on the 'Net, Morris served as a wake-up call about the risk of software bugs, and it set the stage for network security to become an important area of computer science. It was also the first time many non-techies heard of the 'Net, as the mainstream media covered the story extensively."
Reader maximus1 contributes a brief ITWorld story about Robert Morris himself.
Hey, these hiccups help make the internet a better and safer place!...Right?
"Mama always said life was like a box a chocolates, never know what you're gonna get" - Forest Gump
Robert Tappan Morris, the 21-year-old Cornell University student who unleashed the first worm attack on the Internet in 1988, has fully rehabilitated his reputation in the computer science community. Today, he is a respected associate professor of computer science at MIT.
Sounds like a terrorist to me. And anyone who's ever taken one of his classes or worked with him is guilty of palling around with terrorists.
This guy's the limit!
and it will be old enough to start drinking.
This was the day that RTM or RTFM didn't refer to reading a manual.
I wish someone would have told me PC's get virus's before I fucked 15 of them.
Dr. D
I hope whoever modded this flamebait stays in bed all day on November 4th. Some people are just too dumb to be allowed to vote.
To drink!
Everyone's a potential terrorist, if you define terrorism as broadly as the Bush Administration does. And, given six degrees of separation, everyone on the planet associates with "known terrorists."
Unwinnable wars (and I'm not talking ones involving military intervention), unwarranted accusations of affiliation with enemies, and heightened paranoid states have become hallmarks of modern Western government. We hold THESE truths to be self-evident.
So, persons convicted of computer security crimes have become part of The Establishemt. Yay. I feel neither less secure nor more.
I would LOVE to see some of that old news footage!
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you!
Is it still active?
Honestly...
These renowned security hackers (Allman, Spafford, Bellovin, etc) speak of leniency for rtm, which I have no problem with. But rarely mentioned is the fact that they all knew of (or knew personally or worked with) rtm's dad, who was a crypto hacker himself, so they all weren't entirely unbiased about the incident.
How can a worm on the "net" be 20 years old? Gore wasn't in office yet!
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Sources say the notorious Morris the Worm come from a hairball coughed up by Morris the Cat. If only he wasn't so finicky.
(ducks) Hey I tried.
http://noname.c64.org/csdb/group/?id=2059
-monk coast
Technically, it is validly flagged as flamebait as it can attract the attention of the less educated who would read it for face value, rather than for the sarcasm.
Without making the sarcasm blatantly obvious to the mindless, the post crosses ever so slightly into the realm of flamebait.
Wait, you're ZeroCool!!!!!
... served as a wake-up call about the risk of software bugs, and it set the stage for network security...
Calling it a wake-up call would imply that people actually woke up and fixed things afterwards.
I don't think that happened. ActiveX was invented after the Morris worm. People wrote email programs that interpreted VBScript in the mail and executed it after the Morris worm.
Remember the goodtimes virus hoax? It was a joke that a virus could propagate via email. It was funny, because viruses *couldn't* propagate via email. Then people implemented that feature in mail programs, opening the door to a rapid rise in email viruses. All, *after* the Morris worm.
So give me a break, but I don't think anybody woke up that time. Or later, for that matter. I don't think the mainstream is taking network security seriously to this day.
I thought he "invented the Net" when he was the V.P.? At least that what I thought he said.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Drink? It's practically dead/extinct already. There aren't many hosts for the morris worm. You have to voluntarily set up a host for it.
So it's a bit inaccurate to say the worm has turned 20.
More accurate to say that it's the 20th anniversary of the worm's attack.
For an excellent verbal picture of Morris, his exploits, and the net as a whole in that era read Steven Levy's "Hackers." Having lived in Redwood City, Ca, one block from the El Camino Real, having accessed MIT's CS facility and seen the "lusers" login message for myself, and even tried the famous choc. chip cookie recipe, and having as a close friend an ex-employee of the old Sierra On-Line Games, all mentioned in the book, it was just a delightful read. It was fun to connect up the missing dots in my incomplete memory of the early days of the internet.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Is the worm still infecting computers and still on the net?
And having read "The Shockwave Rider", had some idea of what we were up against. My role that day is described elsewhere and is of little importance, however. What IS important is that it provided a wake-up call that was badly needed, and that it taught us one of our early lessons in reactive self-defense, full disclosure, and cooperation. We're still learning.
i thought about the Doors, for some reason...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
OK, I agree, it was too harsh but compared to what you would get today for doing something like that I think he got off easy.
(Yeah, I'll get modded down for trolling or whatever, but this needless brainwashing has got to stop!)
Yup. The bastards modded you down. And then they accuse YOUR ilk of "censorship"!
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
What he did was not considered new at the time. But he was the first one rude enough to do it in a destructive manner. The problem was known at the time and the agreement was you just didn't do that.
I remember coming into the office and everyone was standing around looking glum. Finally someone suggested we have a cup of tea. What do do? There was no Usenet coming down the pipe, how would we get through the day without reading news? It was horrible. Little did we know we'd be offline for 3 days and it wouldn't be until the next week that service would get back to normal. We actually had to go and do some work!
Gawd, makes me feel really old. How is ol' RTM?
So if you may have heard "a worm that turned", it is a saying that means a worm is defending itself. Who ever thought words taken out of context have simple meanings?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Someone mod this and the parent post Funny, please.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've always wondered how things would have turned out if they had decided back then that the vendors selling the vulnerabilities were responsible for the damage it permitted (encouraged?) instead of pretending that there would never be bad guys on the network. Maybe all those Microsoft viruses would never have happened...
It was Wednesday. That afternoon we learned there was a "worm" loose on the network. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) had slammed closed the gateways between the unclassified operational MILNET and the original R&D ARPANet. Unfortunately DISA did two things wrong: 1) they were too late, and 2) they cut the DoD off from critical civilian information sources needed to mitigate and stop the worm.
For two days the Air Force struggled to identify all of its UNIX systems on the MILNET. We didn't have databases like we had today. Whenever the folks at Gunter Air Force Station found another site, they'd relay the information to me. The phone call that followed went something like this:
"Hello. This is Captain Foo from Air Force Communications Command Directorate of Operations. There is a 'worm' propagating throughout the MILNET and attacking UNIX systems. You MUST disconnect your system ASAP."
"Uh sir, this is Airman Snuffy. You want me to do WHAT? I can't do that without authorization from my supervisor, Master Sergeant Flap."
"Then call him immediately."
"But it's four o'clock in the morning..."
"Call him. NOW!"
This went on around the clock for two days. By evening on Friday, November 4th I slumped into the basement bar at the O Club. I looked and felt like hell. As I reached for the pitcher of beer on the table my friends asked "What's wrong?"
"There's a mother-f****** worm loose on the DDN."
"A what?"
In the days that followed we learned that the Air Force losses were limited to one UNIX workstation at MacDill AFB, FL and a bunch of workstations behind the Aeronet Gateway in California. The Army and Navy got hammered.
About the time I'd decided I wanted to cut off the b***s of whoever was responsible, I learned it was the son of one of the most distinguished men associated with the early Internet.
For the rest of this story, I refer the reader to Clifford Stohl's "The Cookoo's Egg".
So this means we can expect to see "Morris Worm Turns 20 Tomorrow" on Saturday and "Happy Birthday, Morris Worm" on Sunday?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
and why should we care that he's 20? I have enough problems with my own damn kids.