On November 2, 1988, the internet got its first real wake-up call about security when the Morris Worm started spreading across the network. Released around 8:30 p.m. Eastern time from a computer at MIT, the self-replicating program was written by Robert Tappan Morris, a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student. He later said he’d built it mainly out of curiosity, to see how many machines were out there and whether a program could quietly make its way across the network. A bug in his own code turned that experiment into chaos.
The worm targeted VAX and Sun-3 computers running Berkeley Unix, breaking in through a handful of known weaknesses: a debug backdoor in the sendmail program, a buffer overflow in the finger command, and guessable passwords. It was designed to copy itself to new machines just once each, but a flaw in that check meant it kept reinfecting systems it had already compromised, piling up copies until machines ground to a halt. By the next morning, an estimated 6,000 computers, roughly one-tenth of the internet at the time, were crippled or offline, and cleanup costs at some sites ran into the tens of thousands of dollars.
The fallout reshaped how the tech industry thought about network security. Morris became the first person convicted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, receiving probation, community service, and a fine. More lastingly, the incident pushed DARPA to fund the creation of CERT/CC, the first computer emergency response team, at Carnegie Mellon, formalizing the idea that the internet needed a dedicated watchdog for exactly this kind of event.
Also on this day: November 2, 1815 marks the birth of George Boole, the English mathematician whose system of symbolic logic, now called Boolean algebra, became the bedrock of digital circuit design and computer science more than a century later.
Source: Wikipedia, Atlas Obscura
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
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