The Internet is a scary place sometimes. Just as on the streets in real life, there are bad actors in play putting out ransomware and Trojan horses to infect the every-man. Viruses are sent out to get after data. It's a pretty profitable job when it's done right. In the beginnings of the Internet, it was pretty easy to mess up systems. This was the case of the Morris Worm in 1988.
A computer worm is a self-duplicating program that infects computers one by one. Back in 1988, computers trusted each other since there were fewer than 100,000 connected computer. This meant lack of passwords or weak passwords and a general trust in files received.
Robert Morris created the worm at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) network. There is discourse about whether Morris intended to teach the community about security or he did it just because he wanted to. Morris was a student at Cornell University. The worm unfortunately caused damage due to its protocol requiring it infect even if the computer says it's already infected seven times. This led to computers having more than one copy of the worm in the system. According to Wikipedia, the exact vulnerabilities it exploited were "A hole in the debug mode of the Unix sendmail program, a buffer overflow or overrun hole in the finger network service, and the transitive trust enabled by people setting up network logins with no password requirements via remote execution (rexec) with Remote Shell (rsh), termed rexec/rsh."
About 60,000 computers were infected with the Morris worm. While it didn't ruin anything in the computer system, it slowed computers to a near halt. Some of the computers were federal use, which meant military emails went by slower. This had some very serious ramifications for the creator. He was charged with violating Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the first person ever charged with that act. Morris is still active in the coding community after serving his sentence of three years' probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050 plus the costs of his supervision.
We've learned a lot about computer security and networks since the Morris Worm days. If it was deployed today, it wouldn't even work since rsh is no longer used. Not to mention, passwords are different now and more advanced. But the impact the Morris Worm had on hackers today is clear. Computer viruses were inspired by the idea the worm exploits. It's important to learn and grow from mistakes made in the past. It shows that often the worst hackers are the ones we already know.
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- Nicole Golden