From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ken@google.com (Ken Thompson) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2017 11:42:26 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm! In-Reply-To: References: <1509630411.25641.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <7335deff-4c63-51d9-ec9b-7435a32ae3c7@gmail.com> Message-ID: my son, corey, and rtm, were two 'kids' that haunted the unix room (high school age). later (college age) i was in australia teaching when the worm got out. during a phone call to corey, i told him about the chaos. with no more clue than that, he said "if i didnt know better, i would think that it was rtm." it wasnt until considerably later that the morris' name came up. On Thu, Nov 2, 2017 at 8:25 AM, Dan Cross wrote: > On Thu, Nov 2, 2017 at 10:42 AM, Will Senn wrote: >> I seem to recall that this story was included as part of The Cuckoo's Egg, >> by Clifford Stoll. I don't recall the specifics and I wonder if it has a bit >> of myth included, but somehow it was peripherally related to the >> investigations. Fuzzy recollection is that the worm got out during the >> investigation Clifford was involved in and it was Morris's son (Morris being >> in on the investigation somehow), and the kid getting off because of the >> position of the dad and the newness of the crime... or somesuch - don't >> shoot the messenger, but nobody mentioned Stoll, so I thought I'd chime in, >> in the hopes it might jog someone else's memory :). > > Stoll mentions the worm in an epilogue to The Cuckoo's Egg; it happens > after the main events of the book. Apparently, for a brief time, some > folks thought that he might be the one behind the worm and someone > called him up and asked him if he'd written it. > > Cliff Stoll talked to a number of people in law enforcement and in > government and thus made a number of contacts while he was pursuing > Markus Hess (the pursuit of Hess being the main story of The Cuckoo's > Egg): Robert Morris Sr was among those contacts. When the worm hit, he > talked to Morris Sr and asked him if he knew who started it. The > response was something along the lines of, "Yes, but I can't tell > you." > > - Dan C.