What Is the Morris Worm?

It was written by Robert Morris, a first-year graduate student at Cornell University. This program is only 99 lines, taking advantage of the shortcomings in the Unix system, using the Finger command to check the online user list, then deciphering the user password, using the Mail system to copy and spread its own source program, and then compile to generate code. The original network worm was designed to "wander" between computers without any damage when the network was idle. When the machine is overloaded, the program can "borrow resources" from idle computers to achieve load balancing on the network. The Morris worm is not "borrowing resources" but "depleting all resources". It was the first worm to spread through the Internet. It is both the first worm and the first time it has received strong attention from mainstream media. It was also the first case to be convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The worm was written by Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris and was released on the Internet from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on November 2, 1988.

Morris Worm

It was written by the United States

1 production process

2 Consequences of Hacking

Worm structure

According to its author, the origin of the Morris worm was not to cause damage, but to measure the size of the Internet. However, the choice to cast the worm at MIT obscured the fact that it was actually from Cornell (coincidentally, Morris MIT was an associate professor). In addition, the Morris worm exploits known vulnerabilities in programs such as sendmail, Finger, rsh / rexec, and weak passwords on Unix systems.

An unintended consequence in the worm code exacerbates its harmfulness. It causes the same computer to be repeatedly infected, and each infection causes the computer to slow down until it becomes unusable. The main body of the worm can only infect BSD 4 and Sun 3 systems running on DEC's VAX machine, and a piece of C language code in the program will call the main body of the program to make it run on other systems.

New York State courts have been struggling to convict him when the police have resolved the case and determined that Morris was the "author" of the disaster. At the time, convictions for computer virus incidents were a worldwide problem. In the former Soviet Union, in 1987, computer personnel at car factories used viruses to damage production lines. The court could only use the crime of hooliganism.

On May 5, 1990, the New York District Court designed a viral program based on Robert Morris, which caused a major accident including the shutdown of computers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, military bases and major universities, and sentenced Morris to three years' probation and a fine of 10,000. USD, obligated to serve the new area for 400 hours. The Morris incident shocked American society and the world. What is more significant and far-reaching than the incident is that hackers have since become black, ethics of hackers have lost control, and the hacking tradition has begun to break. The public's impression of hackers can never be answered. Moreover, computer viruses have since entered the mainstream.

The common saying is that the Morris worm infected about 6,000 Unix computers. Paul Graham declared: ^[3]

"I was present when this statistic was made, and they counted like this: Someone estimated that about 60,000 computers were connected to the Internet, and the worms infected about 1/10 of them.

The U.S. government audit office estimates the cost of the worm to be between $ 10 million and $ 100 million.

To cope with the crisis of worm infections, Gene Spafford created a mailing list called "phages."

Morris was tried and found guilty of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. After an appeal, he was sentenced to three years' probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $ 10,000. ^[4]

The Morris worm is sometimes called the "Great Worm" because of its devastating impact on the Internet at the time, including the long downtime of the system, and the psychological concerns about the security and reliability of the Internet Shock. The term Big Bug comes from the names of two dragons in Tolkien's novel: Skarsha and Grau. ^[5]