Morris Worm To Turn 20 - How Far Things Have Come

The Internet will mark an infamous anniversary on Sunday, when the Morris worm turns 20. Considered the first major attack on the ‘Net, the Morris worm served as a wake-up call to the Internet engineering community about the risk of software bugs, and it set the stage for network security to become a valid area of research and development.

“It was a really big deal,” says Eric Allman, a computer programmer who in 1981 authored sendmail, open source Internet e-mail software, while he was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. Today, Allman serves as chief science officer at Sendmail, a company that sells commercial-grade versions of the software.

“The biggest implication of the Morris worm was that the Internet was very small … and it was considered a friendly place, a clubhouse,” Allman says. “This [attack] made it clear that there were some people in that clubhouse who didn’t have the best interests of the world in mind … This made it clear we had to think about security.”

It was when the Internet first got into the mainstream media and was known to the general public, albeit it was for the wrong reason. But still I doubt anyone expected back then how dependant we would eventually become on the Internet.

Now if something like this went on and 10% of the Internet was down and seriously effected by a worm which caused denial of service….the whole World would be in turmoil.

It’d be chaos seriously!

The Morris worm was written by Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris, who was later convicted of computer fraud for the incident. Today, Morris is a respected associate professor of computer science at MIT.

Launched around 6 p.m. on Nov. 2, 1988, the Morris worm disabled approximately 10% of all Internet-connected systems, which were estimated at more than 60,000 machines.

The Morris worm was a self-replicating program that exploited known weaknesses in common utilities including sendmail, which is e-mail routing software, and Finger, a tool that showed which users were logged on to the network.

The Morris worm was able to break into Sun 3 systems and Digital VAX computers running BSD Unix. The fast-spreading worm kept copying itself and infecting computers multiple times, causing many systems to fail.

It’s an interesting story to read if you are familiar with it and probably even more interesting if you’re not, so do check out the Wiki pages on the history of the situation.

There have been very few worms that have caused such widespread infection and failures. Blaster was quite memory and on the virus front I remember CIH was terrible.