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'Morris Worm' Turns 25: Watch How TV Covered It Then
netbuzz writes "On Nov. 2, 1988, mainstream America learned for the first time that computers get viruses, too, as the now notorious "Morris worm" made front-page headlines after first making life miserable for IT professionals. A PBS television news report about the worm offers a telling look at how computer viruses were perceived (or not) at the time. 'Life in the modern world has a new anxiety today,' says the news anchor. 'Just as we've become totally dependent on our computers they're being stalked by saboteurs, saboteurs who create computer viruses.'"
Don't forget, Bob Morris's dad was head of the NSA. Where do you think Bob learned that the ordinary system security is horrid? And where do you think Bob learned that, when you screw up and lives and careers are at stake, it's more important to go hiding the evidence that might lead back to you than to publish the mistake and help get the mistake controlled?
Must be nice to have a dad who can help keep the NSA from reporting anything for a *week* while the civilians reverse engineered the work and tracked it back, and who can help guide your career into a nice little computer lab at MIT where you can produce nothing useful for the rest of your life, but will be out of your dad's hair. (Look up Computer Architecture Group at MIT, and its complete lack of useful projects or meaningful work from Robert Tappan Morris). My dad would have beat me with a *stick* for this kind of stupidity.
I'm not so mad at him because he wrote the worm.: a technical error caused it spew far more copies than intended, it was supposed to only prove popr security. I'm mad at him because he acted like a kid who went went camping in a national park, set a fire where he wasn't supposed to, and *drove out of state to hide* instead of reporting the fire. The bastard cost me weeks of work in my own lab, cleaning up from his mess, and ruined chances to do vital medical experiments that I was involved in. Medical research labs live on a shoestring as it is, knocking us and our colleagues offline could and did ruin years of work. I was personally *lucky*, because of thorough backup policies and I knew what I was doing to recover, but a lot of labs suffered far worse. (I did a lot of helping out in the next month.)
The Morris Worm was written by Cornell University student Robert T. Morris while in school. He is the son of former chief scientist of the NSA's National Computer Security Center, and inventor of the Unix password scheme, Robert Morris. The incident is discussed in part of this book:
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
I've enjoyed reading it more than once.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell