The Morris worm or Internet worm was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet; it is considered the first worm and was certainly the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It was written by a student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris (now an associate professor at MIT), and launched on November 2, 1988 from MIT. A eerwrewrdferdferBold textcomputer worm is a self-replicating computer program, similar to a computer virus. ... For other uses of the name Cornell, see Cornell (disambiguation). ... Robert Tappan Morris (b. ... November 2 is the 306th day of the year (307th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 59 days remaining. ... 1988 is a leap year starting on a Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research and educational institution located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is a world leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ...

Architecture of the worm

The Morris worm was not written to cause damage but to spread; bugs in the code, however, caused it to be more damaging -- a computer could be infected multiple times and each additional process would slow the machine down to the point it would be unusable. The Morris worm worked by exploiting known vulnerabilities in Unix sendmail, Finger, rsh/rexec and weak passwords. It could only infect DEC VAX machines running 4 BSD and Sun 3 systems. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Unix-like. ... Sendmail is an open source mail transfer agent (MTA): a computer program for the routing and delivery of email. ... The finger protocol is a simple network protocol based on RFC 1288 (The Finger User Information Protocol). ... Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i. ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) is the UNIX derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley starting in the 1970s. ... Sun Microsystems (Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...

Effects of the worm

It is usually reported that around 6,000 major Unix machines were infected by the Morris worm. Programmer Paul Graham has claimed that "I was there when [this statistic] was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them." [1] The GAO put the cost of the damage at $10M - $100M. Robert Morris was tried and convicted of violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. After appeals he was sentenced to three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of more than $10,000. For Paul Graham the genealogist, see Paul Graham (genealogist). ... The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the audit, evaluation, and investigative agency of the United States Congress. ... 1986 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a law passed by the United States Congress in 1986 intended to reduce hacking of computer systems. ...

CERT (the Computer Emergency Response Team) was created as a response to the Morris Worm. For other meanings of CERT, see CERT (disambiguation) The CERT/CC (Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center) was created by DARPA in November 1988 after the Morris Worm struck. ...

The Morris worm has sometimes been referred to as the "Great Worm", because of the devastating effect it had upon the Internet at that time, both in overall system downtime and in psychological impact on the perception of security and reliability of the Internet. The name derives from the "Great Worms" of Tolkien, Scatha and Glaurung. Scatha, known as Scatha the Worm, was a dragon in J. R. R. Tolkiens fantasy universe of Middle-earth. ... Known as the Deceiver, Glaurung was a land-bound fire-breathing Dragon, in J. R. R. Tolkiens fictional universe of Middle-earth. ...

See also

• Notable computer viruses and worms

This is a list of noteworthy computer viruses and worms. ...

External links

• An analysis of the worm by Eugene Spafford
• An analysis of the worm by Mark Eichin and Jon Rochlis
• The Morris Internet Worm by Charles Schmidt and Tom Darby
• Source code of the Morris Worm
• Source code of the Morris Worm in .tar.gz format
• Helminthiasis of the Internet - RFC 1135, an analysis of the worm infestation.
• Great Worm from The Jargon Lexicon