Happy 20th birthday, internet worm!

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I'm not proud of this (be it a warning!)

I'm not proud of this, I wrote a worm by mistake more than twenty years ago.

I was working for a satellite comms company somewhere in Europe.

I thought it would be a good idea if I found out what was connected to the control system and keep a small DB of the various units. That way I could tailor the initiallisation protocols for each individual network device.

Well, the idea was that in the test phase the programme was supposed to report back to my terminal what was connected to our test system.

What I didn't realise/know was that our test system was connected to the company wide network.

Yes, I got back all the bits that were hanging off the test system,. However I also got every device that was attached to the company network that could answer the interogation.
It was written to wait for slow responses with a time out of about 300 seconds.

Everything streamed to my terminal and I couldn't terminate the process. More than that nobody else could because I gave the said process a protected status and as opcom was kilometres away I couldn't kill the damned thing! Even by going there.

It caused me my job as it looked like an attack on the companys' systems. The idea was valid the execution was not!

Posted by: jakelly404@...   Posted on: 11/02/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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