The infamous Morris Worm was released in 1988; making use of known
vulnerabilities in Sendmail/finger/RSH (and weak passwords), it took out a
metric shitload of SUN-3s and 4BSD Vaxen (the author claimed that it was
accidental, but the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first). A
temporary "condom" was discovered by Rich Kulawiec with "mkdir /tmp/sh".
Another fix was to move the C compiler elsewhere.
This comes up every year, but could I ask that you please stop referring to Robert T. Morris as an idiot? He acted foolishly and destructively, yes, but he was quite young at the time and he paid for his mistake. He's gone on to do very good work in systems and have a productive career; there really is no need to continue to castigate him in this manner for a mistake he made 31 years ago.
- Dan C.