The Great Worm Essay

Submitted By vsara93
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Pages: 3
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The era we live in today is all about the internet and technology. There have been various stories on hackers breaking into portable devices, computers, and even military databases through viruses. Although internet viruses are more commonly known now, Robert Morris was recognized as the first hacker to spread a “worm” from the internet. He mistakenly created and launched a worm, which spread like wildfire onto university computers, medical research facilities, and even governmental and military networks. Although it wasn’t his intention, it certainly got him noticed.
Robert Tappan Morris grew up with a computer science background through his father, who was a computer chief scientist from the National Security Agency. “Through undergraduate work at Harvard and in various jobs, he had acquired significant computer experience and expertise” (Loundy.com). During the fall of 1988, 23 year old Morris became a first-year graduate student at the University of Cornell. His field of study was on Computer Science for the Ph.D. program. Upon entering Cornell University, Morris was given a computer account for the Computer Science Division. With this account, he was granted authorization to access other computers. One thing he noticed about the security software of the computers was that it was be easily penetrable. In October, Morris went to work on creating the “worm.” The purpose of the program was to exhibit the lack of security on computer networks. On November 2, Morris launched the virus from a computer at MIT. He chose to operate there to cover his tracks. The worm had a 99-line code sequence but he made an error while writing it.

There were four ways the worm could hack into a computer from the Internet: The first was through a portal in SEND MAIL, a computer program that sends and receives electronic mail. The second was through a bug in the “demon” program, which is a program that allows someone to get a hold of partial information about the user of another computer. The third was through the Trusted Hosts facet. It allowed the user with specific opportunities on one computer to have the same opportunities on another computer without having a password. The fourth way was through a program where it guessed the password using many combinations of letters.

The program was specifically designed to expand through the Internet. Morris’ intention was to have the worm expand without being detectable. It was meant to occupy little computer operating time and not hinder normal computer use. Morris created the worm to ask each computer if it already had a copy of the virus. If the response was a "no," then the virus would make a copy onto the computer; if the response was a "yes," the worm would not make another copy. “He hoped that only one copy of the worm would infect each computer, but in an attempt
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