Happy Birthday Morris Worm!

20 years ago, Cornell student Robert Tappan Morris released the first Internet Worm - a program that attacked computers, copied itself to the newly infected target computer, and then selected new targets, repeating ad infinitum. The rest has been, shall we say, history.

I was a young security engineer, and remember the absolute chaos that broke out. This was going to be the end of the Internet. This was only the Pleistocene Age of the Internet, remember - there were only around 60,000 computers total on the whole net. Morris' worm took over 6,000 of them, so he still holds the all-time record for the "What Percent Of The Internet Did You Pwn" category.

The 1988 TV News report is an interesting mix of cluelessness and cluefulness ("I think it's an A student.")



Young Mr. Morris was discovered by a lynch mob of pail-skinned VAX system administrators, was duly tried and convicted by a jury of his peers, and is now a professor at MIT.

Trivia about Morris:

• His father, Robert Morris, Sr. was chief scientist at the NSA's National Computer Security Center. This caused more than a little excitement at Ft. Meade, let me tell you. #1 Son thinks that Morris wrote the worm because he was sick of his dad always talking about Internet Security ...
  
• His initials are RTM, and this was the name of his user account when he released his worm. Some people (rather uncharitibly) started referring to him as RTFM.
• Robert T Morris is not in fact the reason that compasses point north. (OK, I made that one up).
  

By the way, Network World has an interesting slide show of the 12 worst moments in Internet Security. Well, interesting if that's your bag, baby.

UPDATE 5 November 2008 18:12: Adam Shostack says it much, much funnier than I.