Robert T Morris, Jr. was a graduate student in Computer Science at Cornell.
On November the 22nd, 1988 he wrote an experimental piece of code which could both reproduce and spread itself across the emerging new world wide web.
What he had created would later become known as a worm.
Soon after releasing his worm Morris found that it was spreading far quicker than he had ever anticipated.
The machines that became infected with this ‘Morris worm’ would lock up or completely crash.
He tried to make amends by sending an anonymous message from Harvard that contained instructions on how to disable the worm but by that time networks were so clogged up that most recipients never received it.
A huge range of computer systems and networks became infected, ranging from medical facilities to military installations.
The cost to remove the Morris worm was quite severe in some instances, rising into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Eventually researchers managed to reverse engineer the worm and after a few days the worm’s affects were largely neutralised.
Everyone wanted to know who was responsible, however, and the The New York Times took a growing body of evidence and pointed the finger at Morris.
Morris was later convicted of violating the computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Title 18) for which he received a sentence of three years probation in addition to four hundred hours of community service and a fine of $10,050.
At the end of 1990 Morris appealed his sentence but it was upheld in March of the following year.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Doubly excellent post.
Most people forget (and probably rightly so) that much early malware was created as “a bit of a joke” or for learning purposes. Had it remained that way, there wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry to try to stop malware AND we’d probably have thousands more very smart programmers working on other world-problems… alas, times have changed. It’s all for profit (on both sides now.)
I guess the age of innocence has passed by.
Do you remember the time when to be called a hacker was actually a good thing?
Best,
Justin.
I’m that old too!!
I think the anti-malware industry being worth billions is a sign of how bad the malware writing industry has got.
It would be nice if the industry could finally find a model that would kill malware — alas, I’m not sure we’ll actually ever see that day.
The moral dilemma is: if one of the large players could actually stop ALL malware, forever. Would they release it? Knowing it would be the end of their business going forward?
I don’t actually think such a solution can exist. But if it did….
Best,
Justin.
Oh, the early days of the internet… I remember them well… 3 hours of playing around with various settings just so I could play Quake online…
I must confess that I wrote a few ‘naughty’ programs when I was younger – the world at large is grateful that modern systems don’t use BBC Basic as I never progressed from that point onwards.
My efforts created havoc in my O’Level computing class but logging people off and deleting their course work was, of course, only for fun
Is the fact that malware is a multi-million pound business a good thing or a bad thing?
On the whole its bad of course, though I know a few good guys who undoubtedly prosper from it too
Hackers as good guys? Oh yeah… I was online that long ago… am I really THAT old???
I think we both know full well that no company would ever bring a solution to market that would jeopardise their future profits.
Even if a CEO took the moral high ground there would be plenty of shareholders who would ensure it never happened.
Besides, if an end was put to malware those behind it would go elsewhere anyway… social networking sites are their new playground now and they’d probably just switch over to socially engineered phishing scams instead imho.
You are right, I don’t think an incumbent player would provide it. I think a start-up would; with the intention of providing a one-off solution to just about every PC user in the world.
I don’t think, however, such a solution can actually exist.
Particularly, as you say, social media platforms are the new “playground” of malware propagators.
I guess that means you get to blog for years to come, and anti-malware vendors get to carry on making money. Alas, that also means malware writers will keep getting to steal our data, id’s and credit card details
Best,
Justin.
Perhaps Apple could come up with a solution that would render a PC immune to malware?
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