What Happened to the Morris Worm? Why the Morris Worm Vanished

Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation machines across the Internet began filling with copies of the Morris worm on 2 November 1988. Two days later the program was gone, and it never returned. Cornell graduate student Robert Tappan Morris launched it from a computer at MIT. It entered through sendmail's debug command, a 536-byte overflow in the finger server, trusted hosts and weak passwords. None of those holes was new. The damage came from one rule in the worm itself, which ignored an existing copy one time in seven, so copies piled up until machines stalled. Cleaning up a single site could cost more than $53,000. What this video covers: • How did a one-in-seven rule stall thousands of computers? • Where did the famous 6,000-computer figure really come from? • Why did a warning posted at 3:34 in the morning arrive too late? • How did an empty folder named sh help stop it? • What happened to Morris after his 1990 conviction? If you ran a Unix machine in 1988, you may remember watching the process list fill with sh. Tell us where you were that week. Subscribe for more measured histories of the software failures that cost real money. The holes were ordinary. The counting rule was the bug. Sources: United States v. Morris, 928 F.2d 504 - U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 1991: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/... The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis, Purdue CSD-TR-823 - Eugene H. Spafford, Purdue University, 1988: https://web.archive.org/web/2015id_/h... With Microscope and Tweezers: An Analysis of the Internet Virus of November 1988 - Mark W. Eichin and Jon A. Rochlis, MIT, 1989: https://www.d.umn.edu/~pahp/readings/... Computer Security: Virus Highlights Need for Improved Internet Management, GAO/IMTEC-89-57 - U.S. General Accounting Office, 1989: https://www.gao.gov/assets/imtec-89-5... #MorrisWorm #RobertTappanMorris #InternetWorm1988 #Sendmail #FingerDaemon #ComputerFraudAndAbuseAct #BSDUnix #CERT #ComputerSecurityHistory #ComputingHistory #TechHistory Disclaimer: The voiceover used in this video was generated using AI.