by Sarah Bell-EtkinThere may be a virus loose on the internet.
-Andy Sudduth, Nov 3. 1988
In the current technological society, we often hear talk of computers being infected by viruses - malicious programs put onto unsuspecting people's computers in order to gain access to information, to turn the computer into a zombie, etc. While we tend to think of viruses as being transmitted via the Internet, in reality, Internet-spread programs are called worms. In the strictest definition, viruses require physical transmission of code from one infected machine to another via CDs or portable drives. A worm, on the other hand, is fully transmissible online and can thus be much more widespread and dangerous than a virus. There are ways to protect against viruses, for instance only accepting disks from a reliable source, however with the interconnectivity we now experience through the Internet, the only surefire way to avoid a worm is to stay disconnected.
Worms have not always been destructive programs. Some of the earliest worms were designed to increase efficiency on networks or simplify processes. The first major malicious worm was released in 1988 by Robert Tappan Morris, the son of Robert Morris, who was a member of the NSA and co-developer of UNIX. Morris Jr. was a student at Cornell when he wrote the (very short) code that became known as the Morris worm. The original purpose of the worm was to see how large the Internet was, without deliberately causing any damage (see Ref 2. for a description of what the worm did and did not do). Theoretically, the worm should have been invisible and should not have negatively affected any infected computers, however Morris' code did not operate perfectly. The strain it put on servers and individual machines quickly became too large for the processors to handle. Entire systems were overloaded within hours, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue for Internet-based business models. Imagine how much more money that would have cost businesses had the worm been released in 2011 instead of 1988!
While the Morris worm was not the first malicious program (viruses had already been around for quite some time), it led to the first conviction of a person under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the USA. In 1990, Morris was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a hefty fine and had to pay out of pocket for the cost of supervision of his community service hours. In an interesting twist, Morris released the worm from an MIT server so that it could not be traced back to his actual position at Cornell; post-probation, Morris became a professor at MIT, where he now holds tenure. His other software enterprises have been far more above-board. For example, he cofounded Viaweb, which develops online stores - it was later sold to Yahoo! for $48 million. He also cowrote Arc with Paul Graham, which is a multi-paradigm programming language.
Even though the Morris worm caused quite a lot of damage to the early Internet, it also helped many companies realize how unsecure their networks were and led to the development of files accessible by password only (i.e. system administrator privileges). Furthermore, it initiated the creation of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) branch specifically to deal with future computer emergencies of a similar scale.
The Morris worm was both incredibly destructive and immensely constructive. It exploited weaknesses in the UNIX system that have since been remedied and drew attention to the future security of networked computing.
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