SDR News

I Heard about it on NPR

It was this month in 1988 that the Morris worm was released, with devastating effect. That marked the first malicious code attack on the network - although it had more the sense of a prank or experiment than evil intent. Within hours, it had brought down 10% of the machines that were on the internet . Of course, the entire internet was the realm of academics, government, and a few corporations - some of which had received millions of IP addresses - un-used due to the mistaken belief that they were for all purposes infinite. There was no web. No Google. Not even Gopher. No video. No audio. Just files, usenet and email and the utilities to create them and move them around. There were no more than 60,000 machines total.

 As Networkworld reports, "The Morris worm was a self-replicating program that exploited known weaknesses in common utilities including sendmail, which is e-mail routing software, and Finger, a tool that showed which users were logged on to the network.".

I heard about it on NPR. And as an email user on a 1200 Baud dial-up modem to a VAX machine somewhere in California, it seemed to be the furthest thing from my my world imaginable. That would be the same NPR that I still depend upon to bring things far from my world into focus.