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The Morris Worm: The Night the Internet Learned It Was Fragile

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The Morris Worm

On 2 November 1988 Robert Tappan Morris released a program meant to measure the size of the internet. A mistake in how it checked for existing copies turned it into something that brought universities and research labs to a halt within hours.

  • The three weaknesses the worm used to spread and why they existed
  • The one in seven rule that turned an experiment into an outage
  • How system administrators at Berkeley and MIT coordinated a fix by phone
  • The first conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
  • Why CERT was founded directly because of this night

A story about intent, carelessness and the birth of incident response as a job.

Transcript
Welcome back to Packet Trace. I am Wei Liang Choo. Last week we followed a billion dollars out of Dhaka. This week we go back much further, to the evening of 2 November 1988, when the internet connected a few tens of thousands of machines. A graduate student at Cornell releases a program from a computer at MIT. It is designed to copy itself quietly from machine to machine and count how many there are. One line of logic is wrong, and by morning computers across the United States are so overloaded that researchers are pulling the plugs out of the wall. In this episode we look at how it spread, how it was stopped by people on the phone to each other, and why this is the night my job was invented. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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