From: a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com (A. P. Garcia)
Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2019 17:49:05 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAFCBnZsMuxchVgvyaTXXjtccJzkWeZMLAP8naA3YXE-e7A6cAw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.1911020732480.11612@aneurin.horsfall.org>
On Fri, Nov 1, 2019, 4:37 PM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
> -- Dave
>
One of my comp sci professors was a grad student at Cornell when this
happened. He shared a small office with Morris and some other students. He
said that he had to explain that he had absolutely nothing to do with it on
quite a few occasions.
Morris was caught partly because he used the Unix crypt command to encrypt
his source code. The command was a computer model of the Enigma machine,
and its output could be and indeed was cracked, after retrieving the
encrypted code from a backup tape.
It's interesting that the worm was quickly detected. The reason was that it
kept infecting the same machines, and as you referred to, it contained a
password cracker, which slowed those machines to a crawl because of the
multiple instances running.
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-11-01 21:49 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-11-01 20:36 [COFF] " dave
2019-11-01 21:12 ` [COFF] [TUHS] " crossd
2019-11-01 21:55 ` clemc
2019-11-01 22:25 ` a.phillip.garcia
2019-11-01 21:49 ` a.phillip.garcia [this message]
2019-11-02 6:35 ` wlc
2019-11-02 6:44 ` wlc
2019-11-02 7:31 ` a.phillip.garcia
2019-11-03 2:05 rudi.j.blom
2019-11-03 4:21 ` clemc
2019-11-03 7:05 ` rudi.j.blom
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