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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

#181

Post by PeterStuer »

fsckboy wrote: post #145
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #81

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 ha…

> the idea of self-replicating software was unusual floppy based viruses were well established and quite common

Yes. We ran non networked, Mac computer rooms at university, and having a good antivirus was an absolute must. Infections spread through floppies.

The Mac's ease of use as opposed to the PC made it also the juiciest virus target.

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

#182

Post by emmelaich »

lysace wrote: post #115
defen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A felony conviction, three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $25,000 (inflation adjusted) fine for a novel non-violent crime with no personal material benefit isn't exactly "got away with it"

Yes, that is getting away with it for someone with means and clout.

You can't judge his behaviour without knowing his intent, and the culture of the late 80s and early internet.

Everyone hacked. When the internet was connected to Sydney University early 90s, all the students were grabbing Stanfords /etc/passwd files and peeking at the open X displays of people in Sweden. Etc. All for fun / curiosity.

You can be sure that even rtm's Dad did similar, perhaps confined to his lab / peers.

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

#183

Post by cogogo »

rootusrootus wrote: post #150
wkat4242 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and a 'host' back then wasn't a cheap PC or something, they tended to be $30000 workstations or $300000 servers. At tech companies and Universities only, and mostly in the US. 60k sounds like a lot for those days. It grew massively from the early 90s. Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.

Those were the days. I still remember my fido number. And I still remember just how painful it was to get uucp working properly. Ugh. But my mother had an email address years before any of her contemporaries. Being a geek was fun then.

I remember my elementary school librarian had some kind of networked computer a touch later, 90-92 timeframe. She tried to explain what email was to me and I still remember being super confused. Think she even showed me on screen my I still did not get it.

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

#184

Post by arcade79 »

hufdr wrote: post #158

Morris’s program wasn’t meant to be malicious, but it accidentally became a turning point in cybersecurity history. Much of what we now know as security research, red teaming, and even the “gray hat” culture can be traced back to that moment.

I'll note that phrack magazine predates the worm by 3 years. Wargames, the movie, predates it by 5 years. 2600 by by 4 years. Mitnick started having fun around 9 years earlier.

I'm not so sure the Morris worm was the turning point.

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

#185

Post by andyjohnson0 »

fsckboy wrote: post #145
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #81

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 ha…

> the idea of self-replicating software was unusual floppy based viruses were well established and quite common

True. I should probably have qualified that to something like "independently self-replicating". Floppy-disk based viruses obviously still required humans in the transmission path, whereas the Morris Worm and its successors were novel in that they used the internet and worked without human intervention.

Memories of adding an illicit McAffee to autoexec.bat on my boot floppies...

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

#186

Post by Brendinooo »

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

I did not know this.

I knew Robert Morris was the financier of the Revolution. I know it's a plucky university outside of Pittsburgh with basketball and hockey programs that punch above their weight. I know there's a pastor in Texas who is...in some legal trouble...with the same name.

Now I have another one to remember!

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

#187

Post by user_7832 »

AgentME wrote: post #128
pjmlp wrote: post #78

Thankfully the security holes in C that have allowed Morris worm to exist, have been taken care by WG14 since then.

The future isn't evenly distributed. I recently discovered an actively developed software project that had a ton of helper functions based on the design of `gets` with the same vulnerability. Surprisingly not all C/C++ developers have learned yet to recoil in horror at seeing a buffer pointer being passed around without a length. (C++'s std::span was very convenient for fixing the issue by letting the buffer pointer…

> Surprisingly not all C/C++ developers have learned yet to recoil in horror at seeing a buffer pointer being passed around without a length.

As someone who wasn't taught better (partly due to not picking CS as a career stream), are there any languages which avoid such vulnerability issues? Does something like rust help with this?

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

#188

Post by moc_saves »

ww520 wrote: post #154
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.

His dad was a legend as well, chief scientist in NSA.

[flagged]

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

#189

Post by donohoe »

cogogo wrote: post #183
rootusrootus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those were the days. I still remember my fido number. And I still remember just how painful it was to get uucp working properly. Ugh. But my mother had an email address years before any of her contemporaries. Being a geek was fun then.

I remember my elementary school librarian had some kind of networked computer a touch later, 90-92 timeframe. She tried to explain what email was to me and I still remember being super confused. Think she even showed me on screen my I still did not get it.

It’s very brave to admit when something confounds you.

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

If that’s too much, think of the internet as a series of tubes, and email as a digital boomerang that returns with an out-of-office reply attached.

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