8 ms·
The Morris Worm at 30
- pseudolus 8y agoThe Morris Worm had a literary inspiration in the form of John Brunner's 1975 "The Shockwave Rider", one of the earliest depictions of computer hacking [0]. A great book that still stands the test of time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
- ohjeez 8y agoIt really is. Awesome book.
- hartzell 8y agoOne of my favorites!
- KineticLensman 8y ago> A great book that still stands the test of time. Agree. I think one of the reasons is that Brunner doesn't actually precisely describe the technology except in terms like 'the home phone service was tied into the net'. This makes it very easy to superimpose our modern perceptions onto a book that is now 45 years old. It's almost less jarring than the mid-80s cyberpunk classics such as Neuromancer with its no-mobile-phones and line-printers-in-space-stations.
- danmg 8y agoToo bad we didn't get the techno-socialism modeled after Allende's Chile that was at the end of the book.
- bibyte 8y agoThe security differences between then and now is so complex that it's just mind-boggling.
- billyhoffman 8y agoThis talks a good bit about how some of the default passwords the Morris Worm checked for in 1988 are on the list of commonly used passwords in 2018. Which is kind of sad but understandable and somewhat excusable because, we’ll, humans. But it overlooks what I think is actually a way sadder and bigger issue: The Morris Worm utilized a buffer overflow in fingerd as one of its propagation mechanisms. Here we are 30 years later and still dealing with code execution vulnerabilities because of various memory mismanagement issues. [face palm]
- killyp 8y agoBuffer overflows will be an issue as long as code is written in languages that allow memory mismanagement. C, C++ and even Fortran are still here and aren't going away any time soon so this isn't going to change anytime in the near future.
- billyhoffman 8y agoI guess that's what I'm sad about. Manual memory management feels like how early automobiles allowed you to adjust the fuel/air mixture by turning a knob: Why are you making me deal with this? There are documents from the US Airforce's computer security group in the mid 1970s talking about buffer overflows. How years and many units of significant digits of precision do we need on the concept that human are fucking terrible at managing their own memory. Yes [insert argument about garbage collection stalls] and yes [insert argument about guaranteed response times], but for the vast majority of programming projects those simply don't apply. The fact that is 2019 and we are still dealing with this is so depressing.
- scottripley 8y agohttps://github.com/arialdomartini/morris-worm https://github.com/arialdomartini/morris-worm
- bediger4000 8y agoI think this is the decompilation that you used to be able to mail-order from the back of 2600 Magazine in the early 90s. There were small pieces of RTM's original code in the famed "Cornell Report", which showed that at least this code is not RTM's original code. Are other decompilations floating around? Did RTM's original code ever get leaked?
- gambler 8y ago>What of the Morris Worm’s other entry method, based on weak passwords? Oh, but we all know that this is totally fixed by 5-factor authentication. You just type in your password, click on an emailed link, type a pin from your mandatory cellphone app, undergo an ECG and then send in a urine sample. And then you're logged in. It's super easy, and if you're not using it, it's your own damn fault. Even when the website you're using doesn't support it. Just get over it and stop using websites not owned by Google already.
- mr-ron 8y agoHow did an article about works turn into a rant about Google? 2 factor authentication is probably the best way to mitigate against automated attacks like this worm. Its unrealistic for root os access, but if more people required an email or text to verify a login, there would be a lot less hacks in the world
- petercooper 8y agoSomehow I was reading about this the other day and what I didn't realize at the time is that Robert Tappan Morris is one of YC's co-founders :-)
- tim333 8y agoPG was quite funny talking about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WO5kJChg3w&feature=youtu.be&t=785 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WO5kJChg3w&feature=youtu.be...
- insertcredit 8y agoOne fact that's seldom reported is that RTM's father, Robert H. Morris Sr, started working for the NSA in 1986, two years before RTM unleashed the worm. Food for thought maybe?
- emptyplate 8y agoNot seldom reported at all. Was actually considered a major career embarrassment for RHMS. Just a coincidence.
- tptacek 8y agoThing I love (puckishly, I admit) pointing out: Paul Graham features in Hafner and Markoffs telling of the RTM worm story in _Cyberpunk_ (as I recall, he's a go-between for RTM and the reporters).
- taborj 8y agoAlso of note: Cliff Stoll deals with the worm in his excellent _The Cuckoo's Egg_ book, including discussions with Robert Morris Sr (RTM's father), who was chief scientist at the NSA at the time.
- idlewords 8y agoCliff Stoll now sells beautiful handmade Klein bottles out of his Berkeley home (by appointment) and is a lovely guy to visit. These are, for my money, the finest non-orientable manifolds available in the Bay Area today. https://www.kleinbottle.com https://www.kleinbottle.com
- tptacek 8y agoDid you ever buy one?
- idlewords 8y agoYeah, I got a small starter bottle. The biggest one I recall seeing was this beast, but I don't know whether it is still for sale: https://www.kleinbottle.com/meter_tall_klein_bottle.html https://www.kleinbottle.com/meter_tall_klein_bottle.html
- tptacek 8y agoNeat! I saw him give a talk once; he's an extraordinarily good speaker.
- mercer 8y agoI got a Klein bottle a while back and it's one of my favorite 'ornamental' possessions!
- hamilyon2 8y agoThere should be two market indices. One should include those few companies that are serious about zero-day vulnerabilities and IT security in general. For example, they should be active with bug bounties. The other one should include stock of rest of market, with proportion of sectors close to first. I wonder, which would do better?
- ohjeez 8y agoI feel so old. Thirty years? I was working in my office (actual _office with a door_, not a cube) at Prime Computer when people began wandering the halls, asking, "What happened to the Internet?" Mostly, for me, it meant I couldn't access alt.music.katebush.
- Angostura 8y agoI was immediately cut off from alt.religion.kibology
- jpmattia 8y agoIt may seem quaint now, but it cost many of us a great deal of time back then and was a huge PITA. My favorite vulnerability is not often mentioned: The sendmail config file used to have a completely byzantine syntax. Consequently, there was a default wizard password that would grant total strangers access, with the understanding that these would be whitehat wizards breaking in to fix your braindamaged mail configuration. The reason for the "whitehat" assumption was really that no one had seen any other color of hat (because why would you break in and do something malicious wtf haven't you got anything better to do?) Simpler times.
- ASalazarMX 8y agoIt fills my heart with nostalgia when I remember how decades ago experts said "It's dangerous to open .exes someone sent you by mail. Images and data files are fine, they don't run and can't infect your computer". Simpler times indeed.
- drallison 8y agoThere is always a local angle (H. Caen). Robert Morris Sr was a cryptographer, chief scientist of the NSA, and father of Robert Tappen Morris, Jr. Robert Tappen Morris Jr. was the creator of the Morris Worm. He is a friend of Paul Graham and is a partner in Y-Combinator.