Robert Tappan Morris is a character of Internet lore, anyone who has studied Computer Science, Software Engineering or Computer Security will have heard of this guy.

He’s pretty much the fellow that made the Internet famous (for all the wrong reasons) and the first creator of a bit of self-replicating network based malware (now known as a worm) that did some serious damage. The worm is called the Morris Worm after it’s creator and this Sunday will be it’s 20 year anniversary.

The Internet will mark an infamous anniversary on Sunday, when the Morris worm turns 20. Considered the first major attack on the ‘Net, the Morris worm served as a wake-up call to the Internet engineering community about the risk of software bugs, and it set the stage for network security to become a valid area of research and development.

“It was a really big deal,” says Eric Allman, a computer programmer who in 1981 authored sendmail, open source Internet e-mail software, while he was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. Today, Allman serves as chief science officer at Sendmail, a company that sells commercial-grade versions of the software.

“The biggest implication of the Morris worm was that the Internet was very small … and it was considered a friendly place, a clubhouse,” Allman says. “This [attack] made it clear that there were some people in that clubhouse who didn’t have the best interests of the world in mind … This made it clear we had to think about security.”

It was when the Internet first got into the mainstream media and was known to the general public, albeit it was for the wrong reason. But still I doubt anyone expected back then how dependant we would eventually become on the Internet.

Now if something like this went on and 10% of the Internet was down and seriously effected by a worm which caused denial of service….the whole World would be in turmoil.

It’d be chaos seriously!

The Morris worm was written by Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris, who was later convicted of computer fraud for the incident. Today, Morris is a respected associate professor of computer science at MIT.

Launched around 6 p.m. on Nov. 2, 1988, the Morris worm disabled approximately 10% of all Internet-connected systems, which were estimated at more than 60,000 machines.

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 on to the network.

The Morris worm was able to break into Sun 3 systems and Digital VAX computers running BSD Unix. The fast-spreading worm kept copying itself and infecting computers multiple times, causing many systems to fail.

It’s an interesting story to read if you are familiar with it and probably even more interesting if you’re not, so do check out the Wiki pages on the history of the situation.

There have been very few worms that have caused such widespread infection and failures. Blaster was quite memory and on the virus front I remember CIH was terrible.

Source: Network World

It seems like most countries are getting more serious about the illegal downloading and the protection of intellectual property, after the UK recently proposed disconnecting ‘pirates’ from the Internet – Australia is now considering following suit.

I guess this is just the start, laws will become more heavy handed and draconian as most of it is driven by money…even though a lot of artists now say they suspect they sell more albums because people have heard their music online.

I mean just look at Sean Kingston and Souljah Boy who got famous from Myspace.

The Government will examine new legislative proposals being unveiled in Britain this week to target people who download films and music illegally. Internet service providers (ISPs) there might be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material.

The music industry estimates 1 billion songs were traded illegally by Australians last year.

Under the three-strikes policy, a warning would be first issued to offenders who illegally share files using peer-to-peer technology to access music, TV shows and movies free of charge. The second strike would lead to the offender’s internet access being suspended; the third would cancel the offender’s internet access.

The three strike system is similar to the proposition in UK to disconnect after an initial warning and a temporary suspension.

Australia has never had the best Internet for downloading anyway as bandwidth is fairly expensive and most ISPs charge by the MB.

She said action had been taken to remove illegally downloaded tracks from blogs, Cyberlocker and BitTorrent sites but this had failed to stem the estimated 2.8 million Australians downloading music illegally last year.

“Because P2P file sharing involves these music files sitting on individual people’s computers, there is very little that MIPI can do to remove those files or stop them being shared,” she said. “That’s why we have been pushing a proposal to internet service providers for a commonsense system of warning notices which, if unheeded, would ultimately result in a user having their account suspended or disconnected.”

National Internet Industry Association chief executive Peter Corones said his members’ reservations over the three-strikes and code of conduct proposals would be discussed with Mr Conroy this week.

I wonder who will be next following these laws? And how will this change the way people use P2P? Bring on the encrypted tunnels? Or private VPNs to other countries to download using their IP address?

Either way it’s something keep an eye on.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald