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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

#101

Post by syncsynchalt »

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.

His dad was Bob Morris. Unless that's the joke you're making.

Bob Morris wrote crypt(1), dc(1), crypt(3), libm, co-wrote the rainbow series, and did additional unknown work as a cryptographer for the NSA.

dmr writes about working with Bob Morris here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250121041734/https://www.bell-...

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

#102

Post by dugmartin »

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.

Slower and unstable. I spent a lot of my freshman year in college on Bitnet chat and iirc about every 30 minutes there would be a "netsplit" and a bunch of folks in the chat would disappear. Maybe it was our universities connection, which I think was direct to UIUC. I've posted here before that back then I thought Bitnet chat was magical. Things like being in a chat room with students in Berlin while the wall was falling felt so futuristic to me.

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

#103

Post by Tor3 »

yodon wrote: post #9

That was one scary exciting day (source: was running machines at MIT at the time)

That day our tech chief at the time came running and told us about the worm, and that apparently our country managed to avoid it because the news spread quickly enough that one guy simply unplugged the whole country from the Internet - there was only a single connection back then. (!)

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

#104

Post by tptacek »

mindcrime wrote: post #100
tptacek wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of this might be that as fun as this all is to talk about, it wasn't super fun for Robert Tappan Morris. My friends from back in the day are not OK with me talking about what they did, even though nothing happened to any of them.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that rtm finds the whole episode embarrassing or whatever and would prefer to avoid the topic. If pg is really his close friend, it makes sense that pg would defer from conversing about it (especially in public) simply out of respect for his friend.

Also of all the places he could ever talk about it --- HERE?

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

#105

Post by mindcrime »

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.

From what I can remember, while there was some public awareness of "computer crime" by 1988 (War Games helped with that), it wasn't exactly a "big deal" to most people yet. My subjective recollection is that things took a marked turn around 1990, with the advent of "Operation Sundevil"[1], the raid on Steve Jackson Games, etc.

And by the mid to late 90's (I'd say about 1997) it was finally becoming "received wisdom" to most hacker that "this is real now: getting caught doing this stuff could mean actual jail time, fines, not getting into college, losing jobs, etc." Now I grew up in a rural part of NC and so we probably lagged other parts of the country in terms of information dispersal, so I expect other people view the timeline differently, so YMMV.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil

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

#106

Post by mindcrime »

tptacek wrote: post #98
mindcrime wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean, sure, it's not my favorite book either, but what's your theory here, that they just made up a Paul?

Nope, no theory at all. Just providing some context for people who might not be as familiar with that book and the authors, and some of the questions that have been raised about it.

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

#107

Post by lysace »

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.

[flagged]

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

#108

Post by tptacek »

mindcrime wrote: post #105
lysace wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From what I can remember, while there was some public awareness of "computer crime" by 1988 (War Games helped with that), it wasn't exactly a "big deal" to most people yet. My subjective recollection is that things took a marked turn around 1990, with the advent of "Operation Sundevil"[1], the raid on Steve Jackson Games, etc. And by the mid to late 90's (I'd say about 1997) it was finally becoming "received wisdom"…

Lots of chaos, but just three arrests. Did any of them proceed to full prosecutions? I'm reasonably sure Bruce Esquibel wasn't charged (at least, there's nothing in PACER to say so). I have no idea who "Tony The Trashman" was.

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

#109

Post by tptacek »

lysace wrote: post #107
tptacek wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Hold on, I need to capture and circulate this claim that I'm a "very obvious leftist" to my friends and acquaintances. Thanks, this made my day.
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