The Email That Escaped in 1988
A graduate student released a small program meant to measure the internet, and within hours it had crippled thousands of machines. This is the story of the Morris Worm, the first malware to spread across the young internet, and how a coding mistake turned a curiosity into the first computer crime conviction. It's a window into the moment the network stopped being safe.
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Robert Morris launched his code from an MIT machine to hide his identity while at Cornell University.
The worm exploited Unix vulnerabilities like weak passwords and a debug mode in the sendmail program.
A logic error caused the program to re-infect machines repeatedly, crashing systems through excessive memory consumption.
Six thousand infected computers represented ten percent of the entire internet in nineteen eighty-eight.
The crisis led to the first conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The outbreak prompted the creation of the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University.
- 01Intro1 min
- 02The MIT Misdirection2 min
- 03The Mechanics of Infection3 min
- 04Ten Percent of the World2 min
- 05The Legal and Institutional Legacy3 min
- 06Outro1 min
- The Morris Worm
- Morris Worm | Federal Bureau of Investigation
- United States v. Morris (1991)
- The Robert Morris Internet Worm - Research
- The Morris Worm (1988): First Major Internet Incident — IT ...
- The 1988 Morris worm, the internet's first cyberattack - LLNL
- What Is the Morris Worm? How One Man Accidentally Destroyed the ...
- [PDF] Morris worm fingerd attack
- Computer Security: Who You Gonna Call?
- Fostering Growth in Professional Cyber Incident Management
- The Morris Worm Turns 30
- The Morris Worm: The 1988 Bug That Crashed the Early Internet and Changed Cybersecurity Forever
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