#The morris worm virus software#

The fast-spreading worm kept copying itself and infecting computers multiple times, causing many systems to fail. The Morris worm was able to break into Sun 3 systems and Digital VAX computers running BSD Unix. 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 onto the network. 2, 1988, the Morris worm disabled approximately 10% of all Internet-connected systems, which were estimated at more than 60,000 machines. Today, Morris is a respected associate professor of computer science at MIT. The Morris worm was written by Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris, who was later convicted of computer fraud for the incident. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that it became an issue again.'

#The morris worm virus software#

'It showed people who cared how dangerous buggy software could be, but nobody else really paid that much attention to network security afterwards. 'The really interesting lesson of the Morris Worm is how little long-term impact it had,' says Steve Bellovin, a professor in the department of computer science at Columbia University who was developing an early firewall at Bell Labs when the attack occurred. This made it clear we had to think about security.'Дespite the high-profile nature of the worm, some experts say its importance was not fully appreciated at the time. 'This made it clear that there were some people in that clubhouse who didn't have the best interests of the world in mind. and it was considered a friendly place, a clubhouse,' Allman says. 'The biggest implication of the Morris worm was that the Internet was very small.