Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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FIGURE 7.4
A worm spreads to other computers by exploiting security holes in computer
networks.
punk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier
, written by Katie Hafner and John
Markoff [25].
BACKGROUND OF ROBERT TAPPAN MORRIS JR.
Robert Tappan Morris Jr. began learning about the Unix operating system when he was
still in junior high school. His father was a computer security researcher at Bell Labs, and
young Morris was given an account on a Bell Labs computer that he could access from
a teletype at home. It didn't take him long to discover security holes in Unix. In a 1982
interview with Gina Kolata, a writer for
Smithsonian
magazine, Morris admitted he had
broken into networked computers and read other people's email. “I never told myself
that there was nothing wrong with what I was doing,” he said, but he acknowledged
that he found breaking into systems challenging and exciting, and he admitted that he
continued to do it.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Morris majored in computer science. He quickly
gained a reputation for being the computer lab's Unix expert. After his freshman year,
Morris worked at Bell Labs. The result of his work was a technical paper describing a
security hole in Berkeley Unix.
While at Harvard, Morris was responsible for several computer pranks. In one of
them, he installed a program that required people logging in to answer a question posed
by “the Oracle” and then to ask the Oracle another question. (The Oracle program
worked by passing questions and answers among people trying to log in.)
