Happy 20th birthday, internet worm!

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20th anniversary of a worm in the wild

As far as I remember, this was the first worm in the wild that used OS vulnerabilities to propagate itself and was also fairly long lived - I remember this worm shut down my University minicomputer a year after it was initially released.

In fact, that exploit got me interested in security exploits - at the time we had strict disk quotas and time limits on the mini, so being able to exploit root and change our logged hours was invaluable (quota we got around using a different bug where you could create a directory and remove it and gain a small amount of space - we would just repeat that with a loop of say 500000 times). I admit, I didn't have too much respect for authority back then. Some of my partners in crime went on to go to grad school at MIT and become professors, as well... I guess the moral is don't give smart bored students limits or they will exploit them.

Posted by: Clewin   Posted on: 10/31/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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