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From: William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com>
To: "A. P. Garcia" <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>,
	Computer Old Farts Followers <coff@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2019 06:44:51 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <51A8CAF2-A105-460B-B1A0-02FE1A276B47@jctaylor.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <9F243C18-0173-417A-9097-E2662AFE7950@jctaylor.com>

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My comments were not directed to A. P. Garcia.

I regret my error.

Bill Corcoran



On Nov 2, 2019, at 2:36 AM, William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com<mailto:wlc@jctaylor.com>> wrote:

Whoa!  Let’s rethink the defamatory ad hominem remarks here.  We were all kids once.  Moreover, my examination of this subject showed that some of our greatest computer scientists, at the time, went to bat for young Morris.  Moreover, calling RTM a nasty name like that is a shoe that simply doesn’t fit.  My goodness RTM is a professor at MIT.   It’s inarguable that the Morris Worm helped his career far more than it hurt it.  Plus, indeed, there was a genuine re-Morris from RTM.

Bill Corcoran

On Nov 1, 2019, at 5:49 PM, A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com<mailto:a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com>> wrote:



On Fri, Nov 1, 2019, 4:37 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org<mailto:dave@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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  reply	other threads:[~2019-11-02  6:45 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 64+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-11-01 20:36 Dave Horsfall
2019-11-01 21:12 ` Dan Cross
2019-11-01 21:55   ` [TUHS] [COFF] " Clem Cole
2019-11-01 22:25     ` A. P. Garcia
2019-11-01 21:49 ` [TUHS] " A. P. Garcia
2019-11-02  6:35   ` William Corcoran
2019-11-02  6:44     ` William Corcoran [this message]
2019-11-02  7:31       ` A. P. Garcia
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2017-11-16 23:24 Doug McIlroy
2017-11-16 23:35 ` Ralph Corderoy
2017-11-03 10:23 Noel Chiappa
2017-11-03 11:20 ` arnold
2017-11-03 13:11 ` Arthur Krewat
2017-11-03 19:26   ` Toby Thain
2017-11-03 20:54     ` Arthur Krewat
2017-11-03  0:53 Doug McIlroy
2017-11-03  1:39 ` Ken Thompson
2017-11-03  9:25   ` arnold
2017-11-02 13:46 Norman Wilson
2017-11-02 14:32 ` Chet Ramey
2017-11-02 14:42 ` Will Senn
2017-11-02 15:00   ` Michael Kjörling
2017-11-02 15:26     ` Tim Bradshaw
2017-11-02 16:48       ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 16:50       ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 16:52       ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 16:54       ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 16:56       ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 16:57       ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 17:00       ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 17:57         ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 15:25   ` Dan Cross
2017-11-02 15:52     ` Will Senn
2017-11-02 18:42     ` Ken Thompson
2017-11-02 12:10 Noel Chiappa
2017-11-02 14:26 ` Dan Cross
2017-11-02  3:46 Doug McIlroy
2017-11-02  5:53 ` George Michaelson
2017-11-01 22:17 Dave Horsfall
2017-11-01 22:32 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2017-11-02 16:43   ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-01 23:03 ` Charles H. Sauer
2017-11-01 23:15 ` Paul Winalski
2017-11-02  0:06 ` Ralph Corderoy
2017-11-02  0:09 ` Dan Cross
2017-11-02  1:08   ` Clem cole
2017-11-02  8:18 ` arnold
2017-11-02 17:56 ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 18:32   ` Lars Brinkhoff
2017-11-02 20:32     ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 21:59       ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-02 22:27         ` Ralph Corderoy
2017-11-04  1:15 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-11-15 21:36   ` Erik E. Fair
2017-11-15 21:50     ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-15 21:54     ` Ron Natalie
2017-11-16  1:05       ` Erik E. Fair
2017-11-16  1:22     ` Will Senn
2017-11-16  1:56       ` Erik E. Fair
2017-11-16  2:41         ` Ron Natalie
2017-11-16  3:00         ` Don Hopkins
2017-11-16  7:39         ` Steve Simon
2017-11-16 15:54         ` Clem Cole
2017-11-16 15:58           ` Jon Steinhart

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