From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris worm
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 07:39:57 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANCZdfo4Mq=-TG3L25_B29w+Hws_0V=eNNea=Vi0VH36NAt1Rg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <201911151431.xAFEVKCO029897@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1385 bytes --]
On Fri, Nov 15, 2019, 7:32 AM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > That was the trouble; had he bothered to test it on a private network (as
> > if a true professional would even consider carrying out such an act)[*]
> he
> > would've noticed that his probability calculations were arse-backwards
>
> Morris's failure to foresee the results of even slow exponential
> growth is matched by the failure of the critique above to realize
> that Morris wouldn't have seen the trouble in a small network test.
>
> The worm assured that no more than one copy (and occasionally one clone)
> would run on a machine at a time. This limits the number of attacks
> that any one machine experiences at a time to roughly the
> number of machines in the network. For a small network, this will
> not be a major load.
>
>
> The worm became a denial-of-service attack only because a huge
> number of machines were involved.
>
> I do not remember whether the worm left tracks to prevent its
> being run more than once on a machine, though I rather think
> it did. This would mean that a small network test would not
> only behave innocuously; it would terminate almost instantly.
>
it had code to do that, but IIRC, there were bugs in that code that
prevented it being completely effective in some cases... the sorts of
cases, though, that a small scale test wouldn't likely catch.
Warner
[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1847 bytes --]
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-11-15 14:40 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-11-15 14:31 Doug McIlroy
2019-11-15 14:39 ` Warner Losh [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-11-13 13:47 [TUHS] Happy birthday " Doug McIlroy
2019-11-12 22:24 Norman Wilson
2019-11-12 20:56 Norman Wilson
2019-11-12 22:00 ` Dave Horsfall
2019-11-13 7:35 ` arnold
[not found] <mailman.3.1572832803.30037.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2019-11-04 18:10 ` Paul McJones
2019-11-04 18:57 ` Bakul Shah
2019-11-04 19:24 ` Richard Salz
2019-11-05 3:48 ` Lawrence Stewart
2019-11-05 16:04 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-11-06 10:37 ` arnold
2019-11-06 13:35 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-11-04 19:25 ` SPC
2019-11-04 20:27 ` Dan Cross
2019-11-04 22:10 ` Michael Kjörling
2019-11-05 0:25 ` Anthony Martin
2019-11-02 14:12 Doug McIlroy
2019-11-02 20:12 ` Warner Losh
2019-11-03 17:12 ` Paul Winalski
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to='CANCZdfo4Mq=-TG3L25_B29w+Hws_0V=eNNea=Vi0VH36NAt1Rg@mail.gmail.com' \
--to=imp@bsdimp.com \
--cc=doug@cs.dartmouth.edu \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).