From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com) Date: Thu, 02 Nov 2017 02:18:23 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <201711020818.vA28INgc006937@freefriends.org> Dave Horsfall 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". > > -- > Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer." I was a sysadmin at the time at Emory U's computing center. We were very fortunate to have the worm bypass us, since we were running a sendmail.cf file that I had written (from scratch!) instead of the standard one. (It was written using Ease, a preprocessor for sendmail.cf files. It took me a long time to write and test. I have, fortunately, literally, forgotten more about sendmail than most people ever know. :-) Anyway, I came in that Monday morning to business as usual, only to hear about the chaos happening in the rest of the Unix world. :-) I am sure, now, that I totally didn't understand then how really lucky we were. Arnold