Robert Tappan Morris
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Robert Tappan Morris (born 1965) is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet. He is the son of Robert Morris, the former chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA).
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[edit] The worm
Morris created the worm while he was a graduate student at Cornell University. The original intent, according to him, was to gauge the size of the Internet. He released the worm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to conceal the fact that it actually originated from Cornell. Unknown to Morris, the worm had a design flaw. The worm was programmed to check each computer it found to determine if the infection was already present. However, Morris believed that some administrators might try to defeat his worm by instructing the computer to report a false positive. To compensate for this possibility, Morris directed the worm to copy itself anyway, fourteen percent of the time, no matter the response to the infection-status interrogation. This level of replication proved excessive and the worm spread rapidly, infecting several thousand computers. It was estimated that the cost of repair for the damage caused by the worm at each system ranged from $200 to more than $53,000. The worm exploited several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems, including:
- a hole in the debug mode of the Unix sendmail program,
- a buffer overrun hole in the fingerd network service,
- the transitive trust enabled by people setting up rexec/rsh network logins without password requirements.
[edit] Biography
1987 - Received his A.B. from Harvard
1988 - Released the Morris worm (when he was a graduate student at Cornell)
1989 - Indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 in July 26, 1989 - the first person to be indicted under this Act.
1990 - Convicted and sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a fine of $10,050 and the cost of his supervision.
1995 - Founded Viaweb, a start-up company that made software for building online stores - with Paul Graham
1998 - Viaweb sold to Yahoo, who renamed it software Yahoo! Store.
1999 - Received Ph.D. in Applied Sciences from Harvard
1999 - Appointed as a professor at MIT.
2005 - Founded Y Combinator, a venture capital firm - with Paul Graham
2006 - Awarded tenure[1]
His principal research interest is computer network architectures which includes work on distributed hash tables such as Chord and wireless mesh networks such as Roofnet.
Morris is a longtime friend of Paul Graham (Graham dedicated his book ANSI Common Lisp to him) and Graham named the programming language that generates the online stores' web pages RTML in his honor.
[edit] See also
Hafner, Katie; John Markoff (1991). Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. ISBN 0-671-68322-5.
