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This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

tomshardware.com

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Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#41

Post by tptacek »

neom wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #35

I'm pretty sure Paul Graham was directly involved in this story (not in any bad, culpable way, but enough that, were a film to be made about it, a well-known actor would be cast for his part). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020635

Out of curiosity, why do you think this?

There's contemporaneous reporting. It's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book! A friend of Morris', named Paul, has a role in the aftermath of the worm.

I'm not dunking on Paul Graham here. If you know anything about me, if anything, this is a point in his favor. :)

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#43

Post by cgriswald »

nilamo wrote: post #26
canucker2016 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick search shows: - a github repo containing "the original, de-compiled source code for the Morris Worm" - see https://github.com/agiacalone/morris-worm-malware - a high level report about the worm - see https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/internet-worm.html

Both of those agree that is was '88...

I strongly suspect 1998 was a typo by OP and he was actually pointing out the discrepancy between 2 Nov and 4 Nov WRT “this day”.

However the article has been updated so only the HN title has this flaw.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#44

Post by londons_explore »

conradev wrote: post #42

I’m still waiting for the first runaway autonomous botnet.

Currently AI doesn't work very well on hardware separated by hundreds of milliseconds of latency and slow network links. Both the training and inference are slow.

However I think this is a solvable problem, and I started solving it a while ago with decent results:

https://github.com/Hello1024/shared-tensor

When someone gets this working well, I could totally see a distributed AI being tasked with expanding it's own pool of compute nodes by worming into things and developing new exploits and sucking up more training data.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#45

Post by pyyxbkshed »

rs186 wrote: post #29

I followed his course 6.5840 on distributed systems ( https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ , YouTube videos at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs... ) and completed the labs. One day, out of curiosity, I looked up his name. Then I realized what a legend he is. Great course by the way.

I am also doing the course now in my freetime. Even I wasn't aware who he is.

On a sidenote, what did you do after the course?

It is an amazing course though!

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#46

Post by lysace »

tptacek wrote: post #39
NewsaHackO wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not. That actually makes everything make much more sense. I was even wordering how he got out of jail time for something like this and just thought he had amazing lawyers.

I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. I got serious access in '93, and into '94-95 there were still netsplits on it (UUNet/NSFNet is the one I remember most). It was a non-remunerative offense, with really unclear intent, that took out a research network. He had good counsel, as you can tell from the reporting about the trial, but the outcome made sense. I doubt his d…

> I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time.

”Computer crime” definitely was though.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#47

Post by nostrademons »

px43 wrote: post #8
NewsaHackO wrote: post #3

I find it funny that: 1) He released it from MIT to avoid suspicion. 2) After he was convicted, he went from Cornell to Harvard to complete his Ph.D. 3) He became an assistant professor at MIT after that. He had to be really spectacular/have crazy connections to still be able to finish his training at a top program and get a job at the institution he tried to frame.

You know his dad ran research at the NSA right? His dad's also a badass and super fun to talk to. Never talked to the son though, but I'd love to some day.

I talked to the son at one of the early (~2008) YC dinners. Actually found him more approachable than PG or most YC founders; RTM is a nerd in the "cares a whole lot about esoteric mathematics" way, which I found a refreshing change from the "take over the world" vibe that I got from a lot of the rest of YC.

Interesting random factoid: RTM's research in the early 2000s was on Chord [1], one of the earliest distributed hash tables. Chord inspired Kademlia [2], which later went on to power Limewire, Ethereum, and IPFS. So his research at MIT actually has had a bigger impact in terms of collected market cap than most YC startups have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#48

Post by tptacek »

lysace wrote: post #46
tptacek wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. I got serious access in '93, and into '94-95 there were still netsplits on it (UUNet/NSFNet is the one I remember most). It was a non-remunerative offense, with really unclear intent, that took out a research network. He had good counsel, as you can tell from the reporting about the trial, but the outcome made sense. I doubt his d…

> I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. ”Computer crime” definitely was though.

Ehh? It had only recently been made explicitly criminal by federal statute. If you're thinking of "the Hacker Crackdown" that occurred a few years after the Morris Worm, or of Kevin Mitnick's exploits, it's worth keeping in mind that they were doing pretty crazy shit even relative to today; they were owning up phone switches across the country. And despite that, the penalties were not crazy high.

What you didn't have back then was financial fraud on the scale that happens today, where even nominal damages run into 8-9 figures.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#49

Post by rmason »

I remember this event as one of the few times that the Internet made the mainstream news in the eighties. After the fact talked with some network people at Michigan and Michigan State and it was not a very good day for them. They also wanted jail time for him which did not happen.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#50

Post by mturmon »

tptacek wrote: post #39
NewsaHackO wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not. That actually makes everything make much more sense. I was even wordering how he got out of jail time for something like this and just thought he had amazing lawyers.

I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. I got serious access in '93, and into '94-95 there were still netsplits on it (UUNet/NSFNet is the one I remember most). It was a non-remunerative offense, with really unclear intent, that took out a research network. He had good counsel, as you can tell from the reporting about the trial, but the outcome made sense. I doubt his d…

Yeah, in 1988 the Internet appeared like a research network that connected universities. No money was directly at stake and the systems harmed didn't appear critical. Related to what Thomas says above, part of the response to the incident was to partition the Internet for a few days [2] - I don't know if such a thing would be possible now.

But looking into the specifics again after all these years [1], I read:

"The N.S.A. wanted to clamp a lid on as much of the affair as it could. Within days, the agency’s National Computer Security Center, where the elder Morris worked, asked Purdue University to remove from its computers information about the internal workings of the virus."

and that CERT at CMU was one response to the incident [2].

So there is a whiff of the incident being steered away from public prosecution and towards setting up security institutions.

Robert Morris did get a felony conviction, three years probation, and a $10K fine. As for hn users, aside from pg, Cliff Stoll has a minor role in the story.

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/20...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm#Effects

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