Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2006 09:48:08 -0500
On Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:26:27 +0200, Georgi Guninski said:
aleph1's paper for the profit and the stack was quite after it, but nothing public about buffer overflows and/or worms before?
Depends how you define "public" - in that day, most good coders knew that you should check arguments, because otherwise the semi-trained chimp at the keyboard might manage to crash the program by making it go off the end of an array. http://www.morrisworm.com/worm-chronology.html Andy Sudduth posted anonymously about an hour after the worm was first spotted - because he didn't want to explain how he knew/understood. 5 hours after: (Wed morning) "The fingerd attack was not even known, much less understood, at this point. Phil Lapsley reported at the NCSC meeting that Ed Wang of Berkeley discovered the fingerd mechanism around 8:00am and sent mail to Mike Karels, but this mail went unread until after the crisis had passed." The fact that it took until 6PM *Thursday* evening for *any* of the security people working on this (and rest assured, *every* security person on the Net at the time was working on it) indicates that the concept of leveraging a buffer overflow into executing code was so foreign that it took well over 36 hours for it to sink in. I have to conclude that before that, buffer overflows weren't even well known *inside* the security community, much less outside in the wider programming community.
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Current thread:
- 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm morrisworm.com (Nov 02)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm Riad S. Wahby (Nov 02)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm Georgi Guninski (Nov 03)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm deep fried (Nov 03)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm Valdis . Kletnieks (Nov 03)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm Valdis . Kletnieks (Nov 03)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm Blue Boar (Nov 03)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worm a.k.a. Morris worm Georgi Guninski (Nov 03)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worma.k.a. Morris worm Dave "No, not that one" Korn (Nov 12)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worma.k.a. Morris worm Valdis . Kletnieks (Nov 12)
- Re: 18th anniversary of Internet worma.k.a.Morris worm Dave "No, not that one" Korn (Nov 13)