How a grad student trying to build the first botnet brought the Internet to its knees

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/01/how-a-grad-student-trying-to-build-the-first-botnet-brought-the-internet-to-its-knees/

BY TIMOTHY B. LEE
The Switch
Washington Post
November 1, 2014

On November 3, 1988, 25 years ago this Sunday, people woke up to find the 
Internet had changed forever. The night before, someone had released a 
malevolent computer program on the fledgling computer network. By morning, 
thousands of computers had become clogged with numerous copies of a 
computer "worm," a program that spread from computer to computer much like 
a biological infection.

It took days of effort by hundreds of systems administrators to clean up 
the mess, and the Internet community spent weeks analyzing what had 
happened and how to make sure it didn't happen again. A graduate student 
named Robert Morris was unmasked as the culprit behind the worm. A 
brilliant loner, he seemed to be motivated more by intellectual curiosity 
than malice. That didn't save him from becoming one of the first people 
prosecuted and convicted under an anti-hacking statute that Congress had 
passed a few years earlier.

But the most significant effect of the worm was how it permanently changed 
the culture of the Internet. Before Morris unleashed his worm, the 
Internet was like a small town where people thought little of leaving 
their doors unlocked. Internet security was seen as a mostly theoretical 
problem, and software vendors treated security flaws as a low priority.

The Morris Worm destroyed that complacency. It forced software vendors to 
take security flaws in their products seriously. It invigorated the field 
of computer security, creating a demand for such experts in both academia 
and industry. Today, the Internet is infested with malware that works a 
lot like the software Morris set out to build a quarter-century ago. And 
the community of Internet security professionals who fight these 
infections can trace the roots of their profession back to the events of 
November 1988.

[...]



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