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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

#131

Post by aleks224 »

tptacek wrote: post #58
not2b wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sort of. RTM underestimated the effect of exponential growth, and thought that he would in effect have an account on all of the connected systems, without permission. He evidently didn't intend to use this power for evil, just to see if it could be done. He did do us all a service; people back then didn't seem to realize that buffer overflows were a security risk. The model people had then, including my old bos…

Interestingly, it took another 7 years for stack overflows to be taken seriously, despite a fairly complete proof of concept widely written about. For years, pretty much everybody slept on buffer overflows of all sorts; if you found an IFS expansion bug in an SUID, you'd only talk about it on hushed private mailing lists with vendor security contacts, but nobody gave a shit about overflows. It was Thomas Lopatic and…

This was great to read. Related: Morris also discovered the predictable TCP sequence number bug and described it in his paper in 1985 http://nil.lcs.mit.edu/rtm/papers/117.pdf. Kevin Mitnick describes how he met some Israeli hackers with a working exploit only in only in 1994 (9 years later) in his book "Ghost in the Wires" (chapter 33). I tried to chronicle the events here (including the Jon Postel's RFC that did not specify how the sequence number should be chosen) https://akircanski.github.io/tcp-spoofing

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

#132

Post by dctoedt »

tptacek wrote: post #109
lysace wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

> I need to capture and circulate this claim that I'm a "very obvious leftist" to my friends and acquaintances.

s/leftist/Catholic/g; (in a good sense)

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

#133

Post by Chinjut »

The 10% number is completely made up. According to Paul Graham, "I was there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them."

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

#134

Post by Dave_Rosenthal »

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.

RTM was my TA at MIT for a CS/systems engineering course. It took the students until we did an assignment about the worm to realize who he was IIRC. The students thought it was very cool, but even then, as a TA covering the assignment, he didn't really talk about it.

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

#136

Post by packetslave »

wslh wrote: post #21

I assume you all know that Robert Morris is one of the YC (and Viaweb) cofounders? [1] Together with Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

and his dad was head of computer security at the NSA for a while

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

#137

Post by oneshtein »

tonyplee wrote: post #38
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.

Would be cool if he adds a session on how to hack distributed system in 1988...

Account "guest" with no password was provided by default back then, to help others do some work remotely, debug connection issues, or chat with admins.

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

#138

Post by iwontberude »

tim333 wrote: post #127
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?

PG spoke about the worm a bit in an interview here: https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-85-paul-graham-and... Some quotes from that: > The worm, no one would have ever known that the worm existed, except there was a bug in it. That was the problem. The worm itself was absolutely harmless. But there was a bug in the code that controlled the number of copies that would spread to a given computer. And so the compu…

I suppose the notion that you could just distribute untested software onto an unlimited amount of other peoples computers without consent wasn't yet considered unethical so therefore the worm was perceived to be absolutely harmless by rtm and pg. Just some minor details they couldn't possibly have seen back then.

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

#139

Post by nakamoto_damacy »

Chinjut wrote: post #133

The 10% number is completely made up. According to Paul Graham, "I was there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them."

That figure is probably UUCP mostly not live connected hosts. I could be wrong, but 60k hosts that you could telnet to sounds like a lot of ducking hosts back then. I was there too, in my late teens. God bless PG.
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