The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
@ 2017-11-03 10:23 Noel Chiappa
  2017-11-03 11:20 ` arnold
  2017-11-03 13:11 ` Arthur Krewat
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 65+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2017-11-03 10:23 UTC (permalink / raw)


    > From: Arnold Skeeve

    > I suspect that he was also still young and fired up about things. :-)
    > ...
    > (In other words, he too probably deserves to be cut some slack.)

Much as RTM was cut some slack?

The thing is there's a key difference. RTM didn't _intend_ to melt down the
network, whereas Gene presumbly - hopefully - thought about it for a while
before he made his call to inflict severe punishment.

Did RTM do something wrong? Absolutely. Did he deserve some punishment?
Definitely. But years in jail? Yes, it caused a lot of disruption - but to any
one person, not an overwhelming amount.

Luckily, the judge was wise enough, and brave enough, to put the sentencing
guidelines (and the DoJ recommendation, IIRC) to one side.

However, that too was not without a cost; it was one more stone added to what
is admittedlyalready a mountain of precedent that judges can ignore the
legislature's recommendations - and once one does it, another will feel more
free to do so. And so we pass from a government of laws to a government of
men.

But I don't give Gene the lion's share of the blame: that has to go to Rasch,
and his superiors at the DoJ, who were apparently (as best I can understand
their motives) willing to crush a young man under a bus to make a point. The
power to prosecute and punish is an awesome one, and should be wielded
carefully and with judgement, and it was their failure to do so that really
was the root cause.

    Noel


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 65+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
@ 2019-11-01 20:36 Dave Horsfall
  2019-11-01 21:12 ` Dan Cross
  2019-11-01 21:49 ` A. P. Garcia
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 65+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2019-11-01 20:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 65+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
@ 2017-11-16 23:24 Doug McIlroy
  2017-11-16 23:35 ` Ralph Corderoy
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 65+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2017-11-16 23:24 UTC (permalink / raw)


> let's not forget that amazing vi-trainer called rogue.

Also amazing is its robust survival at angband.org.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 65+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
@ 2017-11-03  0:53 Doug McIlroy
  2017-11-03  1:39 ` Ken Thompson
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 65+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2017-11-03  0:53 UTC (permalink / raw)


[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2090 bytes --]

I think "classlessness" is intened as an antonym to "classy".

Spafford with high dudgeon called early for punishment. He had tempered
it somewhat by the time he wrote his CACM article, published in June
1985. But still some animus shows through, in "even-handedly" 
speculating about whether the worm was intended as a lark or as
something nefarious. He evidently had mellowed a lot by the
time of the last quotation below.

In the CACM article Spaff quoted someone else as suggesting that
Morris did it to impress Jodie Foster, and he called Allman's
back door in Sendmail a debugging feature that people could
optionally turn off. As far as I know it was not disclosed that
DEBUG allowed remote control of Sendmail. In fact Sendmail was
so opaque that Dave Presotto declined to install it and wrote
his own (upas) for Research.

I don't recall the cited "contest". And Dennis's reaction to
the CaCM article seems somwhat harsh. But the context is that
Spafford's overheated initial reaction did not win friends in
research. 
> 
> Can anyone remember or decipher what this was about???
> 
> Date: 24 Mar 90 06:52:43 GMT
> From: dmr at alice.att.com
> Subject: Re: Contest announcement
> To: misc-security at uunet.uu.net
> 
> My own contest is "Most appalling display of classlessness in dealing with
> a serious subject."  The nominees are:
> 
> 1) National Center for Computer Crime Data, Security Magazine, and
>    Gene Spafford, for their "How High Shall We Hang Robert Morris?"
>    contest.
> 
> 2) Gene Spafford, for the most tasteless article ever to appear in CACM
>    (special credits for the Jodie Foster joke).
> 
>         Dennis Ritchie
> 
> Some context maybe?
>> 
>> “He has not tried to make any money or work in this area,” Purdue 
>> University computer science professor Eugene Spafford said of Morris 
>> in an interview with The Washington Post. “His behavior has been 
>> consistent in supporting his defense: that it was an accident and he 
>> felt badly about it. I think it’s very much to his credit that that has 
>> been his behavior ever since.”


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 65+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
@ 2017-11-02 13:46 Norman Wilson
  2017-11-02 14:32 ` Chet Ramey
  2017-11-02 14:42 ` Will Senn
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 65+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2017-11-02 13:46 UTC (permalink / raw)


Robert T Morris (the son who committed the famous worm) was an
intern at Bell Labs for a couple of summers while I was there.
He certainly wasn't an idiot; he was a smart guy.

Like many smart guys (and not-so-smart guys for that matter),
however, he was a sloppy coder, and tended not to test enough.

One of the jokes in the UNIX Room was that, had it been Bob
Morris (the father) who did it,
a.  He wouldn't have done it, because he would have seen that
it wasn't worth the potential big mess; but
b.  Had he done it, no one would ever have caught him, and
probably no one would even have noticed the worm as it crept
around.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 65+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
@ 2017-11-02 12:10 Noel Chiappa
  2017-11-02 14:26 ` Dan Cross
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 65+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2017-11-02 12:10 UTC (permalink / raw)


    > From: Doug McIlroy

    > A little known fact is that the judge leaned on the prosecutor to reduce
    > the charge to a misdemeanor and accepted the felony only when the
    > prosecuter secured specific backing from higher echelons at DOJ.

I had a tangential role in the legal aftermath, and am interested to hear
this.

I hadn't had much to do with the actual outbreak, so I was not particularly
watching the whole saga. However, on the evening news one day, I happened to
catch video of him coming out of the court-house after his conviction: from
the look on his face (he looked like his dog had died, and then someone had
kicked him in the stomach) it was pretty clear that incareration (which is
what the sentencing guidelines called for, for that offense) was totally
inappropriate.

So I decided to weigh in. I got advice from the Washington branch of
then-Hale&Dorr (my legal people at the time), who were well connected inside
the DoJ (they had people who'd been there, and also ex-H+D people were
serving, etc). IIRC, they agreed with me that this was over-charging, given
the specifics of the offender, etc. (I forget exactly what they told me of
what they made of the prosecutor and his actions, but it was highly not
positive.)

So we organized the IESG to submit a filing in the case on the sentencing, and
got everyone to sign on; apparently in the legal system when there is an
professional organization in a field, its opinions weigh heavily, and the
IESG, representing as it did the IETF, was the closest thing to it here. I
don't know how big an effect our filing had, but the judge did depart very
considerably from the sentencing guidelines (which called, IIRC, for several
years of jail-time) and gave him probation/community-service.

Not everyone was happy about our actions (particularly some who'd had to work
on the cleanup), but I think in retrospect it was the right call - yeah, he
effed up, but several years in jail was not the right punsishment, for him,
and for this particular case (no data damaged/deleted/stolen/etc). YMMV.

	Noel


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 65+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
@ 2017-11-02  3:46 Doug McIlroy
  2017-11-02  5:53 ` George Michaelson
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 65+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2017-11-02  3:46 UTC (permalink / raw)


> the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first

That would have "proved" that the worm worked safely, for
once every host was infected, all would go quiet.

Only half in jest, I have always held that Cornell was right
to expel Morris, but their reason should have been his lack
of appreciation of exponentials.

(Full disclosure: I was a character witnesss at his trial. A
little known fact is that the judge leaned on the prosecutor
to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor and accepted the felony
only when the prosecuter secured specific backing from 
higher echelons at DOJ.)

Doug McIlroy


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 65+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!
@ 2017-11-01 22:17 Dave Horsfall
  2017-11-01 22:32 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
                   ` (7 more replies)
  0 siblings, 8 replies; 65+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2017-11-01 22:17 UTC (permalink / raw)


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."


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 65+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2019-11-02  7:32 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 65+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2017-11-03 10:23 [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm! Noel Chiappa
2017-11-03 11:20 ` arnold
2017-11-03 13:11 ` Arthur Krewat
2017-11-03 19:12   ` [TUHS] "Oregano" and Unix wizards Don Hopkins
2017-11-03 19:21     ` Ralph Corderoy
2017-11-03 20:02       ` William Pechter
2017-11-03 19:26   ` [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm! Toby Thain
2017-11-03 20:54     ` Arthur Krewat
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-11-01 20:36 Dave Horsfall
2019-11-01 21:12 ` Dan Cross
2019-11-01 21:49 ` A. P. Garcia
2019-11-02  6:35   ` William Corcoran
2019-11-02  6:44     ` William Corcoran
2019-11-02  7:31       ` A. P. Garcia
2017-11-16 23:24 Doug McIlroy
2017-11-16 23:35 ` Ralph Corderoy
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

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).