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This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

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

#81

Post by andyjohnson0 »

A good account is With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's Perspective [1], published in CACM a few months after the event. Notice it was the worm.

I was an intern at IBM in '88 and they shut-down the (iirc) two internet getaways to their corporate network (vnet) while people figured out what was going on. News moved slowly back then, and the idea of self-replicating software was unusual. Although IBM had had its own replicator the previous year [2].

[1] https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gskc/security/rochlis89microsco...

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

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #64
lysace wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please expand? He was and is very smart. This is not disputed. He was 23 at the time. Not exactly a child. The worm was surprisingly elaborate containing three separate remote exploits. It probably took a few weeks to build and test. So sabotaging thousands of at the time very expensive network connected computers was a very deliberate action. I posit that he likely did it to become famous and perhaps even successful…

I'm not psychoanalyzing the guy, I'm saying I'm not surprised he had an elite academic career, because he's an elite performer.

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

bdcravens wrote: post #5

From the Wikipedia article: Clifford Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg, wrote that "Rumors have it that [Morris] worked with a friend or two at Harvard's computing department (Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for 'Any news on the brilliant project')". Has pg commented on this?

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by seethishat »

tptacek wrote: post #77
seethishat wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diversity is security! I wish more people understood that. It may be more difficult to manage a bunch of diverse systems, but they are much more resilient to attacks.

I don't think that's proven out, like, at all; measure it against the returns on hardening mainstream platforms. The "monoculture" security thing has always been overblown, not least because you're never going to get an ecology where you have enough diversity to matter. Having 3 mainstream desktop or phone options is only marginally better than having just 1, and you're never going to have 20.

Do you do anything besides post on HN ;)

Put everything in MicroSoft Active Directory. Wait until it gets hacked. You will lose DNS, DHCP, Email, file servers, web servers, endpoints, etc. Obviously, running a mono-culture is a dumb thing to do if you want to keep your business running.

Maybe instead, run BIND on Linux servers, Apache on OpenBSD servers, have some Chromebooks, some Macs, etc. so everything doesn't go down together.

Really, it's not overblown... it's just common sense to diversify. Like we do with our diet/nutrition, with our financial investments, etc.

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

#85

Post by mr_toad »

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.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but it seems like nothing was such a big deal at the time.

Everything seems to have gotten more uptight in the last few decades. I used to have a metal cutlery set that an international airline gave to every passenger on the plane.

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

#86

Post by hinkley »

sedatk wrote: post #61
axpy906 wrote: post #33

> the internet in 1988 60k computers ( mostly at institutions ) in 20 countries

Everything was slower though. Turkey as a whole country had one 9600bps link to Bitnet at the time. Internet was accessed through Bitnet gateways. Systems (CPUs and I/O in general) were also much slower.

ftp.wustl.edu would manage about 1 KBps and I was sitting one hop away from it at UIUC.

Insomnia paid off a lot back then.

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

#87

Post by rasz »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #13
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.

> tried to frame. MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. It was probably more effective than sending in some PDF of a paper.

Its the other way around, they throw hackers under the bus. Aaron Swartz, Star Simpson arrested for stupid LED brooch, the list is quite long https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7411868

MIT faulted over its support for students https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/02/14/mit/9VBBq9pBQ1z... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7411312

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

#88

Post by mindcrime »

tptacek wrote: post #41
neom wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

It's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book!

Not sure if that was supposed to be sarcasm[1] or was intended seriously, but for what it's worth Hafner & Markoff have frequently received a lot of criticism for playing fast and loose with the truth in that book. Now most of that is specifically in regards to their treatment of Mitnick, and I'm not making any particular accusation here. Just sharing a thought that "it's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book" might not be terribly strong evidence of $WHATEVER.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

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

#89

Post by esafak »

mr_toad wrote: post #85
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. Maybe I’m just getting old, but it seems like nothing was such a big deal at the time. Everything seems to have gotten more uptight in the last few decades. I used to have a metal cutlery set that an international airline gave to every passenger on the plane.

Organizations naturally accrue regulations in response to incidents as time goes by.
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