What's the "morris internet worm"? I could google it, but I doubt I'd understand it. (Unrelated, I think you look very nice in your big hat.)
oh my gosh, thank you! i love answering questions, but I don’t really get asked an awful lot these days, and this is one that i know a reasonable bit about! i feel like @kremlint.
what’s the Morris Internet Worm? well, my friend, Therein Lies A Tale!
the Morris Internet Worm (sometimes called the “Great Worm” by analogy to Tolkein) was one of the first malware programs to be spread via the internet, and also one of the first pieces of malware to receive much media attention. it’s also a classic tale of being just smart enough to get yourself into trouble.
Robert Tappan Morris Jr. was a grad student at Cornell. in 1988 he released a self-replicating program – a _worm_ – onto the internet. Morris, being a tremendous jackass, released the worm from a machine at MIT rather than Cornell, because he wanted to imply that the Brilliant Genius Coder (i.e., himself) who had written this bit of code went to MIT (amusingly, Morris would later go on to become a tenured professor at MIT many, many years later).
Morris claimed that he had written the worm not to intentionally cause damage, but as an attempt to figure out how big the Internet was. unfortunately – remember how I mentioned that Morris was a jackass? – he made a critical mistake that resulted in his worm’s bringing down about 6000 Unix machines: a pretty big chunk of the network at the time.
Morris’ worm infected VAXen and Sun workstations running 4BSD Unix through vulnerabilities in `sendmail`, a program that routes email messages on mail servers; `finger`, a network protocol that allowed you to look up personal information on users of different computers on the network – like their name, email address, and something called a plan file, where you could choose to put stuff about what you were currently up to, sort of like a primitive, hackers-only Twitter from the 80s; and `rsh`, a remote login program that predated `ssh` (read: “a program that let you log in on another computer on the network”). if all of that sounds like a whole bunch of nonsense, that’s okay; basically these were commonly used utilities present on just about every Unix system. the worm used security flaws in these programs to spread by sending a bit of code that Morris called the “grappling hook”, which then downloaded and started the main body of the worm.
Morris’ $10,000,000 mistake, though, was in the way the worm chose whether or not to spread to a new computer. the worm would ask each machine it saw on the network whether there was already a copy of it running, and only spread to those machines where it wasn’t. however, Morris was clever, and he recognised that you could pretty easily stop the spread of the worm just by writing a program that responded to that request by saying “yes”, and the worm would leave you alone. so he had the Exceptionally Bright Idea that one out of every seven times the worm was present on another machine, it would copy itself again anyway, just in case.
as you might have guessed, the worm spread much, much faster than Morris had anticipated, and that it still spread to already-infected machines meant that those computers were quickly running many, many copies of it. all of these worm processes placed a huge drain on those computers’ resources, crashing them or making them unusably slow.
after about half a day of non-stop hacking, teams at Berkeley and Purdue figured out temporary fixes for the security holes that allowed the worm to spread. however, since a lot of big sites were either down or had chosen to cut off network access to protect themselves from the worm, it took a while for patches to get distributed, and it took several days for the internet to recover.
Morris was convicted of violating the computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Title 18), and sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a fine of $10,050. his worst punishment, though, was that someone changed his username at Cornell from his initials, “RTM”, to “RTFM” – the hacker abbreviation meaning “Read The Fucking Manual”.
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