Re: A code red that could bring down the net?

From: Pete Sherwood (petersherwood@home.com)
Date: 07/25/01 

Message-ID: <01d301c11551$c3343f40$0d01a8c0@sherwood>
From: "Pete Sherwood" <petersherwood@home.com>
To: "Dom De Vitto" <dom@devitto.com>, "Patrick Smallwood" <smalwood@us.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: A code red that could bring down the net?
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 17:35:36 -0400

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[snip]

> I give up...who is William T Morris? My G-Dads name is Morris Williams,
> but he doesnt like the Internet, much less interested in a "Big DoS" of
> it...

[snip]

> I think a guy called William 'T' Morris may have had this idea first.
> Allegedly :-)

Robert T. Morris!

> History. History. History.

OK. Here is one explanation:

In 1988, the ARPANET had its first automated network security incident,
usually referred to as "the Morris worm" (4). A student at Cornell
University (Ithaca, NY), Robert T. Morris, wrote a program that would
connect to another computer, find and use one of several vulnerabilities to
copy itself to that second computer, and begin to run the copy of itself at
the new location. Both the original code and the copy would then repeat
these actions in an infinite loop to other computers on the ARPANET. This
"self-replicating automated network attack tool" caused a geometric
explosion of copies to be started at computers all around the ARPANET. The
worm used so many system resources that the attacked computers could no
longer function. As a result, 10% of the U.S. computers connected to the
ARPANET effectively stopped at about the same time.

See:
http://www.cert.org/encyc_article/tocencyc.html

> Dom

Pete Sherwood
613-260-0612 (home/office)
613-591-8900 ext. 525 (voice-mail)
PGP and Thawte digital keys available @
http://members.home.net/petersherwood/

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Relevant Pages

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