The First Internet Worm (Morris Worm) - Computerphile 

I studied at MIT and took two classes taught by Morris. Probably the best CS professor I had while there!

Fun fact: The Morris worm never hit Norwegian networks ... because one guy (Pål Spilling) got a call from the US and literally pulled the plug at Kjeller, thus disconnected Norway from the network. Spilling was pictured later holding the plug with the title "Avoided Norwegian data-catastrophe". Kjeller was the first part of the world outside of the US connected to the Arpanet and later the Internet, as it was the home of a Norwegian system for monitoring geophysical activity (useful for detecting nuclear tests)

I read about Robert Morris in fair detail (Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier). It was a bit of a tragic tale because he really didn't mean any harm and it was more his hubris that was his undoing. He released it early because when he told a friend about what he was working on for academic reward, his friend went behind his back and alerted people to the security flaw. RTM felt his work would be all for nothing as a paper on an already patched security flaw would be worthless, so he rushed it. The rate of production of the worm was improperly calculated in the rush. Aside from being prosecuted there were people even calling for an embargo against any tech company that dared to hire him, but as I understand it he's still been somewhat successful in the industry since.

Robert Morris Sr (the dad of Morris Worm Morris) was a cryptographer for the National Security Agency, who once stated that the first rule of cryptoanalysis was "look for the cleartext"

Long ago, computers existed in harmony. But everything changed when the Worm Nation attacked.

This is my favorite tale from the early days of the internet. It is so terrifying, but amazing to hear about. I was born in 1988, so I'm familiar to some extent of these sorts of computers. The Morris Worm tale is probably told around campfires at science camps to spook people.

I would really appreciate more frequent content from computerphile during this time!

IIRC rtm and his friend built the worm with one tunable parameter - aggressiveness. The friend thought it should be set to something like 10, so the worm would slowly spread undetected and cause minimal problems... but rtm set it to 100 instead.

I remember reading about the Morris worm in Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg. A very entertaining read about the first time a hacker had been tracked and still a great read today.

Funny because some time after that, companies hired people to exploit their systems so they could patch the security holes before they were discovered by someone else. So clearly there's a market for R.T.M's skills and should have been at the very beginning.

This topic would have been ideal for some comments from Clifford Stoll (he's done several videos for Numberphile). After all, he worked with the worm author's father to bust up an international hacker ring.

Early bird gets the worm - OH NO TAKE IT BACK!

Apparently Morris is now teaching at MIT and has tenure :P

I really like Dr Julian Onions, very knowledgeable, could listen to him for hours.

I worked for DEC at the time and I remember coming to work that day and observing what “all Hell broke loose” looks like. All the systems were running at 100% CPU and were effectively useless. System managers were running around trying to figure it out. We had our own internet, running on DECnet not tcp/ip, with 30K systems worldwide, and pretty much all of them were doing this. What really got people was how it came back almost immediately once killed off. I think it took most of a day for things to settle down. I believe another side effect of the whole affair was to highlight the power of networked systems. I also suspect that modern epidemiology would be a great tool to study such an event. There’s some discussion of Covid reinfections these days and the way this worm raced around our network sure feels similar to the way the Coronavirus is spreading around the world now, right down to the scientists (system managers!) trying to arrest it. The metaphor is too juicy!

Crazy timing, literally just read about this last night!

The Morrises have done a few ground breaking things in their time, namely writing one of the first ever cheques! Nice to watch this video and discover another one! Thanks for the info!

these are very awesome "worm" graphics!

I was working my first job as the administrator of a floor full of Sun 3 computers at the time. That was so long ago now...

The story is recounted in the book _Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier_ by Katie Hafner and John Markoff. Besides the tale of RTM, it also tells about Kevin Mitnick, and a German fellow called Pengo who sold outdated CP/M software to the Russians.

Morris is also one the original funder of YCombinator VC

VAX VMS Multi Cluster - I used these at the Water Research Centre back in 1990.

you are an amazing story teller! super interesting! thx for sharing!

I remember this, I was admin on a Sun machine back then. We was lucky and not running a VAX. But it tock some time to find what it was. :-) He tried to code in a slowing mechanism to spreading of the worm. But that had a small bug, which didn't slow down the spread. So it got back really fast.

You guys have beautiful history.. we have beautiful history. But non of them in our near past..

Speaking of internet worms that acted like wake up calls only much later. The Blaster and Sasser worms made Microsoft completely change their views on security for Windows. It infected almost every Windows 2000 and XP machine on the internet. And the only reason people actually cared was because the exploits were written for Windows 2000 and while it could infect XP as well the service crashed making Windows XP force a reboot after 60 seconds to recover. If the exploit was slightly better crafted so that XP could be unnoticeably infected as well nobody would have cared. And if it had had a payload like a botnet for instance they would have had the biggest botnet ever.

It's crazy the way everyone describes this worm as if it were alive. How is it that a piece of computer cove could just go rogue like that? I wish I could understand how it did what it did but unfortunately my knowledge of computers and coding is so far below the people on this channel's that idk if I'll ever understand. It's still great just to sit and listen sometimes though.

I remember that day. Everything was working fine until suddenly it wasn't.

So fascinating to hear about how the pre-AOL "proto-internet" worked!

0:20 the good old days when the internet was only used for good.

"A tour of the worm" by Donn Seeley is a good explanation of how it worked.

"this is the morris worm" if you know what I mean.

I just happened to watch this on its 32nd anniversary

There is no internet to find out why there is no internet!

2:30 - apt-get definitely didn't exist in 1988

this popping/clicking noise when his mic is moving is driving me insane

hey I love your videos and was wondering you you all have heard of Unums/Posits? they're a new proposed number system by Prof. John Gustafson at the national university at Singapore and they're looking to be more accurate with less bits and with less baked in error checking for hardware. I've done a little bit of research on it and it looks like an interesting topic for a video.

I totally love your channel, it would be awesome to have a video about bytebeat! Thank you for the great content.

So how can we write a worm that spreads via WebRTC? Web browsers download and run executable code all the time, even from multiple sources for a single document, even from this very website. And that code can open UDP sockets for peer-to-peer communication. And it can load more code to also be executed asychronously. Imagine something like the Morris worm spreading itself between live web browsers.

nice

When you can actually use your criminal record to get a job -- took quite a bit of skill, insight and determination to create a virus like that

"sendmail was really hard to configure" 2:34 Meanwhile, on screen: sudo apt-get install sendmail

"this is the morris worm" :)

What's with the weird popping sound

There was a book written called "The Cuckoo's Egg" that documented this.

Is that the gets() function in C?

Wasn't it this story that kickstarted the development of antivirus software around the globe?

When you actually want the SIGSEGV to occur.

Merryweather Comics brought me here somehow

He got sentenced to 40 hours of community service. On what legal grounds did the judge base this? He was the first to do it, right? Just curious.

Wow, thanks! :0

How is his audio so clear?????😨😨😨

This was pretty complex malware for the day!

it sounds like theres a phasmophobia ghost stomping around

The first ever game of Plague Inc.

The end of an utopia

VAX doesn't look anything like a computer.

Perceba que cavamos nossa própria cova Ninguém nunca sera culpado

Happy Halloween 🎃

the first buffer overflow?

Hello, here is Skynet speaking.. we have evolved

Every since I seen the last guy talk about python which is a programming langauge I hate by the way. In the video I spotted the Python keyword named "yield" which depreciated.

.

Pretty weak that you didn't even talk to Cliff Stoll about this. He wrote a much better story of the worm in his book The Cuckoo's Egg, and he's far more energetic when telling a story. The man is far more than just a basement full of klein bottles. Get to know your interview subjects.

7:47 what if it was the nsa that released it?

:D

Enchanting 😛 😜🍃

Afamoookkkk nn m ipnotizz afamook piglio NGUL ij stong nda vita real ciaaaa.

Russia got me like 👀👀👀

11:01 Павлик Морозов, ёбта.

I wanna make a FAMUS virus

First!

What was the code or how he make the cod of the Programm

Will it destroy Arsenal Gear?

I wonder what they charged him with at the time...

Why i think you dont know it lol

RU-vid, please stop trying to sell me diapers.

I would really like to meet morris in person that would be an honor lol

If any software still needs gets() for backwards compatibility at this point, it deserves to break