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This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
- canucker2016 1y agoWikipedia says the Morris worm went out on 1998 Nov 2. No idea why they would publish the article on 2025 Nov 4 with that title.
- krustyburger 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm 1988
- canucker2016 1y agoA quick search shows: - a github repo containing "the original, de-compiled source code for the Morris Worm" - see https://github.com/agiacalone/morris-worm-malware https://github.com/agiacalone/morris-worm-malware - a high level report about the worm - see https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/internet-worm.html https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/internet-worm.html
- nilamo 1y agoBoth of those agree that is was '88...
- mlyle 1y agoI think his question was whether it was Nov 2 or Nov 4...
- cgriswald 1y agoI strongly suspect 1998 was a typo by OP and he was actually pointing out the discrepancy between 2 Nov and 4 Nov WRT “this day”. However the article has been updated so only the HN title has this flaw.
- IvyMike 1y agoSounds like the type of mistake I always make: Notice someone being off by two days, and in haste, post a correction that is off by ten years.
- giantrobot 1y agoWith that username you don't even need to be all that close to get the job done.
- mmooss 1y agoThe article is from a somewhat reliable source; Wikipedia is not a reliable source (by Wikipedia's own rules). Maybe you should use the article to update Wikipedia?
- NewsaHackO 1y agoI find it funny that: 1) He released it from MIT to avoid suspicion. 2) After he was convicted, he went from Cornell to Harvard to complete his Ph.D. 3) He became an assistant professor at MIT after that. He had to be really spectacular/have crazy connections to still be able to finish his training at a top program and get a job at the institution he tried to frame.
- px43 1y agoYou know his dad ran research at the NSA right? His dad's also a badass and super fun to talk to. Never talked to the son though, but I'd love to some day.
- chihuahua 1y agoRTM Jr is a very nice person, obviously very smart, but also has a good sense of humor and is friendly and approachable. We overlapped as C.S. grad students at Harvard for several years.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoI did not. That actually makes everything make much more sense. I was even wordering how he got out of jail time for something like this and just thought he had amazing lawyers.
- tptacek 1y agoI think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. I got serious access in '93, and into '94-95 there were still netsplits on it (UUNet/NSFNet is the one I remember most). It was a non-remunerative offense, with really unclear intent, that took out a research network. He had good counsel, as you can tell from the reporting about the trial, but the outcome made sense. I doubt his dad had much to do with it.
- lysace 1y ago> I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. ”Computer crime” definitely was though.
- bdcravens 1y agoFrom the Wikipedia article: Clifford Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg, wrote that "Rumors have it that [Morris] worked with a friend or two at Harvard's computing department (Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for 'Any news on the brilliant project')". Has pg commented on this?
- tptacek 1y agoWould you?
- zelda420 1y ago[flagged]
- Zak 1y agoIf the statute of limitations was long passed and I had fuck you money, why not?
- tptacek 1y agoI think part of this might be that as fun as this all is to talk about, it wasn't super fun for Robert Tappan Morris. My friends from back in the day are not OK with me talking about what they did, even though nothing happened to any of them.
- mindcrime 1y agoFor the sake of argument, let's assume that rtm finds the whole episode embarrassing or whatever and would prefer to avoid the topic. If pg is really his close friend, it makes sense that pg would defer from conversing about it (especially in public) simply out of respect for his friend.
- tptacek 1y agoAlso of all the places he could ever talk about it --- HERE?
- api 1y agoIt's a little shocking to me that there haven't been more things like this. While we're much more conscientious and better at security than we were way back then, things are certainly not totally secure. The best answer I have is the same as what a bio professor told me once about designer plagues: it hasn't happened because nobody's done it. The capability is out there, and the vulnerability is out there. (Someone will chime in about COVID lab leak theories, but even if that's true that's not what I mean. If that happened it was the worst industrial accident in history, not an intentional designer plague.)
- exasperaited 1y agoTo a fairly significant extent, the Morris worm is why there haven't been more; it did prompt something of a culture shift away from trusting users to trusting mechanisms, mostly by prompting people to realise that the internet wasn't only going to be in the hands of a set of people who were one or two degrees of separation apart. It didn't make sense to assume people would treat it with reverence like a giant beautiful shared space. It's most obviously paralleled by Samy Kamkar's MySpace worm, which exploited fairly similar too-much-trust territory.
- throawayonthe 1y agoI imagine the - heterogeneity of modern computing environments - number of 'layers' in any system - sheer size of the modern Internet all also make it harder to scale
- jjtheblunt 1y agoyour mention of designer plagues reminded me of the russian bioweapons anthrax leak in 1979 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7973702/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7973702/
- cheschire 1y agoHere's a whole list of "more things". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botnets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botn...
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- ratelimitsteve 1y ago>However, the pioneering Morris worm malware wasn’t made with malice, says an FBI retrospective on the “programming error.” It was designed to gauge the size of the Internet, resulting in a classic case of unintended consequences. had RTM actually RTM the world might be a bit different than it is today.
- not2b 1y agoWell, sort of. RTM underestimated the effect of exponential growth, and thought that he would in effect have an account on all of the connected systems, without permission. He evidently didn't intend to use this power for evil, just to see if it could be done. He did do us all a service; people back then didn't seem to realize that buffer overflows were a security risk. The model people had then, including my old boss at one of my first jobs in the early 80s, is that if you fed a program invalid input and it crashed, this was your fault because the program had a specification or documentation and you didn't comply with it.
- tptacek 1y agoInterestingly, it took another 7 years for stack overflows to be taken seriously, despite a fairly complete proof of concept widely written about. For years, pretty much everybody slept on buffer overflows of all sorts; if you found an IFS expansion bug in an SUID, you'd only talk about it on hushed private mailing lists with vendor security contacts, but nobody gave a shit about overflows. It was Thomas Lopatic and 8lgm that really lit a fire under this (though likely they were inspired by Morris' work). Lopatic wrote the first public modern stack overflow exploit, for HPUX NCSA httpd, in 1995. Later that year, 8lgm teased (but didn't publish --- which was a big departure for them) a remote stack overflow in Sendmail 8.6.12 (it's important to understand what a big deal Sendmail vectors were at the time). That 8lgm tease was what set Dave Goldsmith, Elias Levy, San Mehat, and Pieter Zatko (and presumably a bunch of other people I just don't know) off POC'ing the first wave of public stack overflow vulnerabilities. In the 9-18 months surrounding that work, you could look at basically any piece of privileged code, be it a remote service or an SUID binary or a kernel driver, and instantly spot overflows. It was the popularization with model exploits and articles like "Smashing The Stack" that really raised the alarm people took seriously. That 7 year gap is really wild when you think about it, because during that time period, during which people jealously guarded fairly dumb bugs, like an errant pipe filter input to the calendar manager service that run by default on SunOS shelling out to commands, you could have owned up literally any system on the Internet, so prevalent were the bugs. And people blew them off! I wrote a thread about this on Twitter back in the day, and Neil Woods from 8lgm responded... with the 8.6.12 exploit! https://x.com/tqbf/status/1328433106563588097 https://x.com/tqbf/status/1328433106563588097
- yodon 1y agoThat was one scary exciting day (source: was running machines at MIT at the time)
- canucker2016 1y agoI remember that day was sooooooooooo quiet on Usenet. Not much was happening in the Eng and CS buildings on campus (except for those that had to deal with the worm).
- baggy_trough 1y agoGood times, good times. I was in a Stanford computer lab when everything started to get very, very slow.
- jhallenworld 1y agoWPI was immune, the main machines on the net at time were an Encore Multimax and a DEC-20.
- Tor3 1y agoThat day our tech chief at the time came running and told us about the worm, and that apparently our country managed to avoid it because the news spread quickly enough that one guy simply unplugged the whole country from the Internet - there was only a single connection back then. (!)
- pyuser583 1y agoWhich country?
- jhellan 1y agoCould have been more, but Norway was one. https://snl.no/Pål_Spilling#:~:text=Da%20Spilling%20kuttet%20forbindelsen,-Spilling%20kuttet%20forbindelsen&text=I%201988%20bredte%20den%20såkalte,enn%206000%20maskiner%20blitt%20infisert. https://snl.no/Pål_Spilling#:~:text=Da%20Spilling%20kuttet%2...
- teeray 1y agoI remember that the Boston Museum of Science used to have a floppy disk on display with the Morris worm on it.
- hnlmorg 1y agoThat exhibit is shown in the article.
- convolvatron 1y agoI used to keep a vt100 at the head of my bed, roll over and check on things a few times at night. 3am and everything is screwed. can't really log in anyplace, or start any jobs. The bus doesn't run until 5:30, so I just get dressed and walk across the bridge the to lab. Visitors center isn't open, so I just sneak through the exit by the guardhouse. They're civilian contractors, they either don't see me, or recognize me and don't care. Since it's all locked up, I just reboot the big vax single user - that takes about 10 minutes so I also start on a couple of the suns. You have to realize that everything including desktops runs sendmail in this era, and when some of these machines come up they are ok for a sec and then sendmail starts really eating into the cpu. I'm pretty bleary eyed but I walk around restarting everything single and taking sendmail out of the rcs. The TMC applications engineer comes in around 7 and gets me a cup of coffee. He manages to get someone to pick up in Cambridge and they tell him that's happening everywhere.
- wslh 1y agoI assume you all know that Robert Morris is one of the YC (and Viaweb) cofounders? [1] Together with Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris
- mindcrime 1y agoHe also is (or was) an HN user. No comments in quite some time though. I wish he did post here more. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rtm https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rtm
- seizethecheese 1y agoKarma of 195. I’d say more of a former lurker.
- packetslave 1y agoand his dad was head of computer security at the NSA for a while
- Brendinooo 1y agoI did not know this. I knew Robert Morris was the financier of the Revolution. I know it's a plucky university outside of Pittsburgh with basketball and hockey programs that punch above their weight. I know there's a pastor in Texas who is...in some legal trouble...with the same name. Now I have another one to remember!
- shadyKeystrokes 1y agoHypothetically if the m$ cloud ecosystem got completely oblibetated (including backups) would customers switch? Or is the lockin as complete as it is with the operating system customers?
- rs186 1y agoI followed his course 6.5840 on distributed systems (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/, YouTube videos at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbsvGQk9_UB https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs...) and completed the labs. One day, out of curiosity, I looked up his name. Then I realized what a legend he is. Great course by the way.
- tonyplee 1y agoWould be cool if he adds a session on how to hack distributed system in 1988...
- tptacek 1y agoIn 1988? Just stick random semicolons in things.
- mindcrime 1y ago> Would be cool if he adds a session on how to hack distributed system in 1988.. username: field password: technician
- oneshtein 1y agoAccount "guest" with no password was provided by default back then, to help others do some work remotely, debug connection issues, or chat with admins.
- PeterStuer 1y agoHonestly, there was not very much security back in those days. So much relied on trusting the Internet "community" not to abuse.
- pyyxbkshed 1y agoI am also doing the course now in my freetime. Even I wasn't aware who he is. On a sidenote, what did you do after the course? It is an amazing course though!
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoThis Week in 1988 rather. https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/morris-worm/ https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/morris-worm/
- anshumankmr 1y ago[flagged]
- not2b 1y ago6,000+, and those machines served many others (back then there were tens of thousands of machines on the Internet, but probably 10x as many that were connected to these by relays that handled email or Usenet traffic).
- tptacek 1y agoAlso worth remember that especially with Internet-connected computers almost everything was multiuser. You did work on the Internet from a shell on a shared Unix server, not from a laptop.
- hshdhdhehd 1y agoServerless remote workspaces as you might call them now.
- axpy906 1y ago> the internet in 1988 60k computers ( mostly at institutions ) in 20 countries
- sedatk 1y agoEverything was slower though. Turkey as a whole country had one 9600bps link to Bitnet at the time. Internet was accessed through Bitnet gateways. Systems (CPUs and I/O in general) were also much slower.
- icedchai 1y agoMuch slower. Most campuses in the US were connected with 56K dedicated lines. The NSF backbone had just upgraded to T1.
- hinkley 1y agoftp.wustl.edu would manage about 1 KBps and I was sitting one hop away from it at UIUC. Insomnia paid off a lot back then.
- dugmartin 1y agoSlower and unstable. I spent a lot of my freshman year in college on Bitnet chat and iirc about every 30 minutes there would be a "netsplit" and a bunch of folks in the chat would disappear. Maybe it was our universities connection, which I think was direct to UIUC. I've posted here before that back then I thought Bitnet chat was magical. Things like being in a chat room with students in Berlin while the wall was falling felt so futuristic to me.
- xandrius 1y agoI expected some info on its functioning. The goal was to gauge the size of the Internet, how? Why did it fail? I guess Wikipedia for the rescue.
- tptacek 1y agoI'm pretty sure Paul Graham was directly involved in this story (not in any bad, culpable way, but enough that, were a film to be made about it, a well-known actor would be cast for his part). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020635
- neom 1y agoOut of curiosity, why do you think this?
- tptacek 1y agoThere's contemporaneous reporting. It's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book! A friend of Morris', named Paul, has a role in the aftermath of the worm. I'm not dunking on Paul Graham here. If you know anything about me, if anything, this is a point in his favor. :)
- neom 1y agoDef know lots about you and def didn't think you were dunking on Paul, hence my curiosity, because it was specifically you Mr. Ptacek. :) Thanks for the answer, I'll check out the book.
- mindcrime 1y agoThanks for the answer, I'll check out the book. It's a great read, but to echo what I said above: there have been a lot of questions over the years about the veracity of some of the details of their book. Take that for what it's worth. I enjoyed it enough that I've read it 3 or 4 times, but I do also suggest consulting other books on the same stories - particularly the stuff around K. Mitnick.
- mindcrime 1y agoIt's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book! Not sure if that was supposed to be sarcasm[1] or was intended seriously, but for what it's worth Hafner & Markoff have frequently received a lot of criticism for playing fast and loose with the truth in that book. Now most of that is specifically in regards to their treatment of Mitnick, and I'm not making any particular accusation here. Just sharing a thought that "it's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book" might not be terribly strong evidence of $WHATEVER. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- conradev 1y agoI’m still waiting for the first runaway autonomous botnet.
- londons_explore 1y agoCurrently AI doesn't work very well on hardware separated by hundreds of milliseconds of latency and slow network links. Both the training and inference are slow. However I think this is a solvable problem, and I started solving it a while ago with decent results: https://github.com/Hello1024/shared-tensor https://github.com/Hello1024/shared-tensor When someone gets this working well, I could totally see a distributed AI being tasked with expanding it's own pool of compute nodes by worming into things and developing new exploits and sucking up more training data.
- conradev 1y agoCouldn’t an AI write and deploy a botnet much like a human does today? With a small, centralized inference core. It doesn’t need to be fully decentralized, the control plane just needs some redundancy
- SchemaLoad 1y agoIt's kind of surprising that it hasn't happened already, outside of iot junk. Seems like computer OSs just got so secure that it's become impractical to deploy a widespread exploit. And everything moved to scamming instead.
- conradev 1y agoThe botnets will always use the biggest bang for their buck, which at the moment is seemingly IoT devices and residential IP proxies. They do still exist: https://blog.cloudflare.com/defending-the-internet-how-cloudflare-blocked-a-monumental-7-3-tbps-ddos/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/defending-the-internet-how-cloud... You don’t need a full host compromise to send network traffic
- rmason 1y agoI remember this event as one of the few times that the Internet made the mainstream news in the eighties. After the fact talked with some network people at Michigan and Michigan State and it was not a very good day for them. They also wanted jail time for him which did not happen.
- throw0101d 1y agoThe term "worm" came from the 1975 (sci-fi) novel The Shockwave Rider: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
- jhallenworld 1y agoThe worm in shockwave rider released secret information to the public. Turns out a worm was not needed for this, just wikileaks.
- pyuser583 1y agoSounds like the plot of sneakers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- housel 1y agoI was a student part-time administrator/systems programmer at the Purdue Engineering Computer Network at the time. Our OS installs had enough local mods (and we had enough non-VAX, non-Sun architectures) that we were immune to some of the worm's modalities, but the sendmail debug mode exploit at least still caused a lot of consternation.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoWas KSB there at the time? That dude was fun.
- housel 1y agoYes, we overlapped around then.
- seethishat 1y agoDiversity is security! I wish more people understood that. It may be more difficult to manage a bunch of diverse systems, but they are much more resilient to attacks.
- tptacek 1y agoI don't think that's proven out, like, at all; measure it against the returns on hardening mainstream platforms. The "monoculture" security thing has always been overblown, not least because you're never going to get an ecology where you have enough diversity to matter. Having 3 mainstream desktop or phone options is only marginally better than having just 1, and you're never going to have 20.
- seethishat 1y agoDo you do anything besides post on HN ;) Put everything in MicroSoft Active Directory. Wait until it gets hacked. You will lose DNS, DHCP, Email, file servers, web servers, endpoints, etc. Obviously, running a mono-culture is a dumb thing to do if you want to keep your business running. Maybe instead, run BIND on Linux servers, Apache on OpenBSD servers, have some Chromebooks, some Macs, etc. so everything doesn't go down together. Really, it's not overblown... it's just common sense to diversify. Like we do with our diet/nutrition, with our financial investments, etc.
- JoshGlazebrook 1y agoThis one is before my time, but I remember the blaster worm very clearly.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 1y agoThat time before shutdown popup is forever etched into my memory.
- pjmlp 1y agoThankfully the security holes in C that have allowed Morris worm to exist, have been taken care by WG14 since then.
- AgentME 1y agoThe future isn't evenly distributed. I recently discovered an actively developed software project that had a ton of helper functions based on the design of `gets` with the same vulnerability. Surprisingly not all C/C++ developers have learned yet to recoil in horror at seeing a buffer pointer being passed around without a length. (C++'s std::span was very convenient for fixing the issue by letting the buffer pointer and length be kept together, exactly like Go and Rust slices.)
- user_7832 1y ago> Surprisingly not all C/C++ developers have learned yet to recoil in horror at seeing a buffer pointer being passed around without a length. As someone who wasn't taught better (partly due to not picking CS as a career stream), are there any languages which avoid such vulnerability issues? Does something like rust help with this?
- pjmlp 1y agoAlmost everything else, besides any language that is copy-paste compatible with C, including systems languages that predate C for a decade, like JOVIAL, ESPOL, NEWP, PL/I and other ALGOL inspired systems languages. Xerox PARC started with BCPL for their systems, but eventually created Mesa exactly for safe systems programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language) http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html "The Mesa Programming Environment" - very first IDE for a systems language https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/XDEPaper.pdf https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/XDEPaper.pdf While Pascal as originally designed wasn't suitable for systems programming, and various dialects sprung out of it, with Object Pascal from Apple/Borland being the most famous one, by 1978 the first standard for Modula-2 was released, which was inspired in Mesa, after Niklaus Wirth spent a sabaticall year at Xerox PARC. Years later, through a similar experience, the evolution of Mesa (Cedar) would influence him to come up with Oberon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2 https://www.modula2.org/modula2-history.php https://www.modula2.org/modula2-history.php Then there was Ada, although too expensive to get compilers and high hardware requirements for 1980's computers. Also all BASIC compilers in the 8 and 16 bit home computers had support for low level systems programming. In recent programming languages, something like Zig would be the closest to what those languages were offering, in safety without having a GC of some form. Naturally this takes cares of most C flaws, minus use-after-free, however due to their type systems, one tends to use heap allocations less than in C, although it remains an issue.
- temperceve 1y agoI might have 10% of the internet from 1988 on my Apple Watch.
- andyjohnson0 1y agoA good account is With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's Perspective [1], published in CACM a few months after the event. Notice it was the worm. I was an intern at IBM in '88 and they shut-down the (iirc) two internet getaways to their corporate network (vnet) while people figured out what was going on. News moved slowly back then, and the idea of self-replicating software was unusual. Although IBM had had its own replicator the previous year [2]. [1] https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gskc/security/rochlis89microscope.pdf https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gskc/security/rochlis89microsco... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Tree_EXEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Tree_EXEC
- fsckboy 1y ago>the idea of self-replicating software was unusual floppy based viruses were well established and quite common
- PeterStuer 1y agoYes. We ran non networked, Mac computer rooms at university, and having a good antivirus was an absolute must. Infections spread through floppies. The Mac's ease of use as opposed to the PC made it also the juiciest virus target.
- andyjohnson0 1y agoTrue. I should probably have qualified that to something like "independently self-replicating". Floppy-disk based viruses obviously still required humans in the transmission path, whereas the Morris Worm and its successors were novel in that they used the internet and worked without human intervention. Memories of adding an illicit McAffee to autoexec.bat on my boot floppies...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DonHopkins 1y agoI was logged into brillig.umd.edu (University of Maryland's Vax 8600) that night, frustrated that my emacs kept getting paged out, rhythmically typing ^A ^E ^A ^E to wiggle the cursor around to keep it paged in while I thought. I ps aux'ed and saw a hell of a lot of sendmail demons running, but didn't realize till the next morning that we were actively under attack, being repeatedly but unsuccessfully finger daemon gets(3) buffer overflowed, and repeatedly and successfully sendmail daemon DEBUG'ed. RTM's big mistake was not checking to see if a machine was already infected before re-infecting it and recursing, otherwise nobody would have noticed and he would have owned the entire internet. What's funny is that UMD was on MILNET via NSA's "secret" IMP 57 at Fort Mead, so RTM's worm was attacking us through his daddy's own MILNET PSN (Packet Switching Node)! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18376750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18376750 >At the University of Maryland, our network access was through the NSA's "secret" MILNET IMP 57 at Fort Mead. It was pretty obvious that UMD got their network access via NSA, because mimsy.umd.edu had a similar "*.57" IP address as dockmaster, tycho and coins. >[...] Once I told the guy who answered, "Hi, this is the University of Maryland. Our connection to the NSA IMP seems to be down." He barked back: "You can't say that on the telephone! Are you calling on a blue phone?" (I can't remember the exact color, except that it wasn't red: that I would have remembered). I said, "You can't say NSA??! This is a green phone, but there's a black phone in the other room that I could call you back on, but then I couldn't see the hardware." And he said "No, I mean a voice secure line!" I replied, "You do know that this is a university, don't you? We only have black and green phones." >[...more stuff about the rumored "Explosive Bolts" that could separate ARPANET and MILNET from Erik Fair and Milo Medin...] More from Jordan Hubbard about his infamous "rwall" incident, when he accidentally sent an rwall message to almost every Unix host on the internet. I received it and sent him a cheerful reply within minutes, which he said was nicer than most of the 743 replies he got. Also: Milo Medin's description of Dennis Perry's reaction (head of DARPA/IPTO) to getting his Interleaf windows scribbled on ("absolutely livid"), Mark Crispin's flame about security, Jordan's response, and Dennis Perry himself replying to Jordan. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138 From: Dennis G. Perry <PERRY@vax.darpa.mil> Date: Apr 6, 1987, 3:19 PM Jordan, you are right in your assumptions that people will get annoyed that what happened was allowed to happen. By the way, I am the program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA, located in Roslin (Arlington), not the Pentagon. [...] Here's my story of The Night of The Worm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29250313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29250313 DonHopkins on Nov 17, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: .plan Yeah, 4.2 BSD fingerd was calling "gets" to read the name of who you were fingering into a small fixed size buffer on the stack. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/gets.3.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/gets.3.html Chris Torek had hacked our version of fingerd (running on mimsy.umd.edu and its other Vax friends brillig, tove, and gyre) to implement logging, and while he was doing that, he noticed the fixed size buffer, and thoughtfully increased the size of the buffer a bit. Still a fixed size buffer using gets, but at least it was a big enough buffer to mitigate the attack, although the worm got in via sendmail anyway. And we had a nice log of all the attempted fingerd attacks! The sendmail attack simply sent the "DEBUG" command to sendmail, which, being enabled by default, let you right in to where you could escape to a shell. Immediately after the attack, "some random guy on the internet" suggested mitigating the sendmail DEBUG attack by editing your sendmail binary (Emacs hackers can do that easily of course, but vi losers had to suck eggs!), searching for the string "DEBUG", and replacing the "D" with a null character, thus disabling the "DEBUG" command. But unfortunately that cute little hack didn't actually disable the "DEBUG" command: it just renamed the "DEBUG" command to the "" command! Which stopped the Morris worm on purpose, but not me by accident: I found that out the day after the worm hit, when I routinely needed to check some bouncing email addresses on a mailing list I ran, so I went "telnet sun.com 80" and hit return a couple times like I usually do to clear out the telnet protocol negotiation characters, before sending an "EXPN" command. And the response to the "EXPN" command was a whole flurry of debugging information, since the second newline I sent activated debug mode by entering a blank line! So I sent a friendly email to postmaster@sun.com reporting the enormous security hole they had introduced by patching the other enormous security hole. You'd think that the Long Haired Dope Smoking Unix Wizards running the email system at sun.com wouldn't just apply random security patches from "some random guy on the internet" without thinking about the implications, but they did! https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/internet-worm.html https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/internet-worm.html >The Sendmail Attack: >In the sendmail attack, the worm opens a TCP connection to another machine's sendmail (the SMTP port), invokes debug mode, and sends a RCPT TO that requests its data be piped through a shell. That data, a shell script (first-stage bootstrap) creates a temporary second-stage bootstrap file called x$$,l1.c (where '$$' is the current process ID). This is a small (40-line) C program. >The first-stage bootstrap compiles this program with the local cc and executes it with arguments giving the Internet hostid/socket/password of where it just came from. The second-stage bootstrap (the compiled C program) sucks over two object files, x$$,vax.o and x$$,sun3.ofrom the attacking host. It has an array for 20 file names (presumably for 20 different machines), but only two (vax and sun) were compiled in to this code. It then figures out whether it's running under BSD or SunOS and links the appropriate file against the C library to produce an executable program called /usr/tmp/sh - so it looks like the Bourne shell to anyone who looked there. >The Fingerd Attack: >In the fingerd attack, it tries to infiltrate systems via a bug in fingerd, the finger daemon. Apparently this is where most of its success was (not in sendmail, as was originally reported). When fingerd is connected to, it reads its arguments from a pipe, but doesn't limit how much it reads. If it reads more than the internal 512-byte buffer allowed, it writes past the end of its stack. After the stack is a command to be executed ("/usr/ucb/finger") that actually does the work. On a VAX, the worm knew how much further from the stack it had to clobber to get to this command, which it replaced with the command "/bin/sh" (the Bourne shell). So instead of the finger command being executed, a shell was started with no arguments. Since this is run in the context of the finger daemon, stdin and stdout are connected to the network socket, and all the files were sucked over just like the shell that sendmail provided.
- unit149 1y ago[dead]
- aussiegreenie 1y agoPG has said that he made up the 10% figure. It was a guess, but it was not correct.
- Chinjut 1y agoThe 10% number is completely made up. According to Paul Graham, "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."
- nakamoto_damacy 1y agoThat figure is probably UUCP mostly not live connected hosts. I could be wrong, but 60k hosts that you could telnet to sounds like a lot of ducking hosts back then. I was there too, in my late teens. God bless PG.
- wkat4242 1y agoYeah and a 'host' back then wasn't a cheap PC or something, they tended to be $30000 workstations or $300000 servers. At tech companies and Universities only, and mostly in the US. 60k sounds like a lot for those days. It grew massively from the early 90s. Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.
- rootusrootus 1y agoThose were the days. I still remember my fido number. And I still remember just how painful it was to get uucp working properly. Ugh. But my mother had an email address years before any of her contemporaries. Being a geek was fun then.
- fanf2 1y agoThe IETF’s review has an amazing title “The Helminthiasis of the Internet” https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1135
- hufdr 1y agoMorris’s program wasn’t meant to be malicious, but it accidentally became a turning point in cybersecurity history. Much of what we now know as security research, red teaming, and even the “gray hat” culture can be traced back to that moment.
- arcade79 1y agoI'll note that phrack magazine predates the worm by 3 years. Wargames, the movie, predates it by 5 years. 2600 by by 4 years. Mitnick started having fun around 9 years earlier. I'm not so sure the Morris worm was the turning point.
- girl2 1y agoI remember that
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoWhen i worked at Convex, there was an unnatural mania that fingerd be disabled and all sendmail patches be applied as quickly as possible. When I asked why, the answer started with "well... a couple of years ago there was this guy from the east coast who worked here for a year..."
- keyliejener 1y ago[dead]
- brazzy 1y agoThe Morris worm is certainly the more historically important one but AFAIK nothing has ever beaten SQL Slammer (2003) for sheer sleekness and propagation speed: 376 bytes, sent as UDP packets to randomly generated IP addresses as fast as the network interface could pump them out. Infected all susceptible hosts on the entire Internet within 10 minutes. Thankfully, that was only MSSQL servers and, being that sleek, it had no persistence mechanism. So turning the machine off and on again removed the infection completely.
- piokoch 1y agoOh, those memories! He was sentenced to pay $10,050, today he would not get away that easily I guess... Another thing I didn't know (citing Wikipedia): "In 1995, Morris cofounded Viaweb with Paul Graham, a start-up company that made software for building online stores. It would go on to be sold to Yahoo for $49 million[14], which renamed the software Yahoo! Store. " and (same source): "He is a longtime friend and collaborator of Paul Graham. Along with cofounding two companies with him, Graham dedicated his book ANSI Common Lisp to Morris and named the programming language that generates the online stores' web pages RTML (Robert T. Morris Language) in his honor."
- eatbitseveryday 1y agoWould be cool to see the source code. Is that saved anywhere other than that floppy in the museum?
- amszmidt 1y agohttps://github.com/arialdomartini/morris-worm/tree/master https://github.com/arialdomartini/morris-worm/tree/master Has the decompiled version.
- jrootabega 1y agoFunnily enough, just a few weeks before that, REM released their eponymous album. Perhaps Morris was inspired by that?
- nticompass 11mo agoThe worm was unleashed November 2, 1988. I was born exactly 7 days later. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.