Today he is an associate professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). But Robert Tappan Morris, known as community informatics “rtm” has a somewhat turbulent past: he was the creator of the first worm, which spread rapidly, and was known as the Morris worm, in 1988. Twenty years ago, in July 1989, Morris was the first person in the history of the Internet to be identified by spreading a virus, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, approved in the United States three years earlier.
Robert, then a student at Cornell University, claimed that the inspiration to create the worm did not cause harm to anyone, but the precise measure of the Internet then. However, the code of the program led to the uncontrolled replication on machines with Unix system, quite widespread in the 80s. The worm exploited flaws in the system, and weak passwords, and quickly spread.
The worm, could infect the machines many times, affecting their performance at each invasion. .In the end, the machines were so slow that it was impractical to use them.. The result was that the supposed experience of Robert became a type of attack can overload servers and computers outside network, a method now known as “denial of service” or DDoS
At the end of the 80s, the Internet had approximately 60 thousand computers, of which 6 thousand were infected by the worm. It may seem little, but it is 10% of the network then. The thing was so severe that the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), birthplace of the Internet, decided to found a center for emergency responses to problems of information security at the University of Carnegie-Mellon, the CERT celebrated today in the reference sector.
The U.S. government estimated that the damage due to the worm could have reached $ 100 million. After him, realized that the Internet, was far from an environment with guaranteed security.. Robert Morris was prosecuted under the law of fraud and sentenced to computational mentioned three years on parole, plus a fine of $ 10 thousand and 400 hours of community service.
Years after successfully completing the award, founded the Robert Viaweb, online tool for the assembly of e-commerce stores, which eventually sold to Yahoo! in 1998 for $ 48 million and became the Yahoo! Store. He continues to plan, but now is focused on other classes, such as the new Arc language.
The worms, however, continue to appear and cause a headache for users and companies. Sobig, MyDoom and current Conficker / Downadup, which broke all records for speed of dissemination, are some examples of this type of threat.
Technorati Tags: Morris Worm, Virus, Robert Tappan Morris
Congratulations to Matt,(I will be sending you a detailed E-mail), all I need from Matt is the Paypal account and maling address and what size shirt you would like. The only thing I will ask from Matt is that he send me his picture wearing the BlogAngry shirt so I can post it here .
happy and hopefully will keep on growing.
a global campaign to highlight the threat of climate change. From the Great Pyramids to the Acropolis, the London Eye to the Las Vegas strip, nearly 4,000 cities and towns in 88 countries planned to join in the World Wildlife Fund-sponsored event, a time zone-by-time zone plan to dim nonessential lights between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.
