On a sidenote, what did you do after the course?

It is an amazing course though!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasser_(computer_worm)

Bill Gates sent out the "Trusted Computing" memo to harden Windows and make it somewhat secure.

Essentially, Windows used to be trivial to exploit, in that Every single service was by default exposed to the web, full of very trivial buffer overflows that dovetailed nicely into remote code execution.

Since then, Windows has stopped exposing everything to the internet by default and added a firewall, fixed most buffer overflows in entry points of these services, and made it substantially harder to turn most vulnerabilities into the kind of remote code execution you would use to make simple worms.

>better at security than we were way back then

In some ways this is dramatically understated. Now the majority of malware comes from getting people to click on links, targeted attacks that drop it, piggyback riding in on infected downloads, and other forms of just getting the victim to run your code. Worms and botnets are either something you "Willingly" install through "free" VPNs, or target absolutely broken and insecure routers.

The days where simply plugging a computer into the internet would result in you immediately trying to infect 100 other computers with no interaction are pretty much gone. For all the bitching about forced updates and UAC and other security measures, they basically work.

Has the decompiled version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botn...

I could be wrong, but I've come to believe that despite the hype they have very little capability.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7973702/

However I think this is a solvable problem, and I started solving it a while ago with decent results:

https://github.com/Hello1024/shared-tensor

When someone gets this working well, I could totally see a distributed AI being tasked with expanding it's own pool of compute nodes by worming into things and developing new exploits and sucking up more training data.

It's most obviously paralleled by Samy Kamkar's MySpace worm, which exploited fairly similar too-much-trust territory.

I have a colleague who suggested that I could look at open source projects on distributed systems and get my hands wet, although I haven't had a chance to do that due to time constraints. Maybe something you could consider.

username: field

password: technician

Bob Morris wrote crypt(1), dc(1), crypt(3), libm, co-wrote the rainbow series, and did additional unknown work as a cryptographer for the NSA.

dmr writes about working with Bob Morris here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250121041734/https://www.bell-...

---

¹Awarders of the Ig Nobel prize

I'm not so sure the Morris worm was the turning point.

Not much was happening in the Eng and CS buildings on campus (except for those that had to deal with the worm).

It’s been a long time since I read the book, but IIRC Cliff visited with Robert Morris (rtm’s dad) at the NSA when he traveled to Washington DC, and I think the worm and rtm are mentioned after he meets with the elder Robert.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+%22mor...

I knew Robert Morris was the financier of the Revolution. I know it's a plucky university outside of Pittsburgh with basketball and hockey programs that punch above their weight. I know there's a pastor in Texas who is...in some legal trouble...with the same name.

Now I have another one to remember!

He did do us all a service; people back then didn't seem to realize that buffer overflows were a security risk. The model people had then, including my old boss at one of my first jobs in the early 80s, is that if you fed a program invalid input and it crashed, this was your fault because the program had a specification or documentation and you didn't comply with it.

His dad's also a badass and super fun to talk to. Never talked to the son though, but I'd love to some day.

MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. It was probably more effective than sending in some PDF of a paper.

1988

Some quotes from that:

> The worm, no one would have ever known that the worm existed, except there was a bug in it. That was the problem. The worm itself was absolutely harmless. But there was a bug in the code that controlled the number of copies that would spread to a given computer. And so the computer would get like 100 copies of the worm running on it, back in the day, when having 100 processes running on your computer would be enough to crash it.

>he called me and told me what had happened.

floppy based viruses were well established and quite common

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rtm

It doesn’t need to be fully decentralized, the control plane just needs some redundancy

You don’t need a full host compromise to send network traffic

As someone who wasn't taught better (partly due to not picking CS as a career stream), are there any languages which avoid such vulnerability issues? Does something like rust help with this?

Interesting random factoid: RTM's research in the early 2000s was on Chord [1], one of the earliest distributed hash tables. Chord inspired Kademlia [2], which later went on to power Limewire, Ethereum, and IPFS. So his research at MIT actually has had a bigger impact in terms of collected market cap than most YC startups have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

It was Thomas Lopatic and 8lgm that really lit a fire under this (though likely they were inspired by Morris' work). Lopatic wrote the first public modern stack overflow exploit, for HPUX NCSA httpd, in 1995. Later that year, 8lgm teased (but didn't publish --- which was a big departure for them) a remote stack overflow in Sendmail 8.6.12 (it's important to understand what a big deal Sendmail vectors were at the time).

That 8lgm tease was what set Dave Goldsmith, Elias Levy, San Mehat, and Pieter Zatko (and presumably a bunch of other people I just don't know) off POC'ing the first wave of public stack overflow vulnerabilities. In the 9-18 months surrounding that work, you could look at basically any piece of privileged code, be it a remote service or an SUID binary or a kernel driver, and instantly spot overflows. It was the popularization with model exploits and articles like "Smashing The Stack" that really raised the alarm people took seriously.

That 7 year gap is really wild when you think about it, because during that time period, during which people jealously guarded fairly dumb bugs, like an errant pipe filter input to the calendar manager service that run by default on SunOS shelling out to commands, you could have owned up literally any system on the Internet, so prevalent were the bugs. And people blew them off!

I wrote a thread about this on Twitter back in the day, and Neil Woods from 8lgm responded... with the 8.6.12 exploit!

https://x.com/tqbf/status/1328433106563588097

He was and is very smart. This is not disputed. He was 23 at the time. Not exactly a child.

The worm was surprisingly elaborate containing three separate remote exploits.

It probably took a few weeks to build and test.

So sabotaging thousands of at the time very expensive network connected computers was a very deliberate action.

I posit that he likely did it to become famous and perhaps even successful, feeling safe with his dad’s position. And it worked. He did not end up in prison. He ended up cofounding Viaweb and YCombinator.

Unironically a great role model for YC. :/

MIT faulted over its support for students https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/02/14/mit/9VBBq9pBQ1z... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7411312

Insomnia paid off a lot back then.

Memories of adding an illicit McAffee to autoexec.bat on my boot floppies...

The Mac's ease of use as opposed to the PC made it also the juiciest virus target.

Xerox PARC started with BCPL for their systems, but eventually created Mesa exactly for safe systems programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language)

http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html

"The Mesa Programming Environment" - very first IDE for a systems language

https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/XDEPaper.pdf

While Pascal as originally designed wasn't suitable for systems programming, and various dialects sprung out of it, with Object Pascal from Apple/Borland being the most famous one, by 1978 the first standard for Modula-2 was released, which was inspired in Mesa, after Niklaus Wirth spent a sabaticall year at Xerox PARC. Years later, through a similar experience, the evolution of Mesa (Cedar) would influence him to come up with Oberon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2

https://www.modula2.org/modula2-history.php

Then there was Ada, although too expensive to get compilers and high hardware requirements for 1980's computers.

Also all BASIC compilers in the 8 and 16 bit home computers had support for low level systems programming.

In recent programming languages, something like Zig would be the closest to what those languages were offering, in safety without having a GC of some form.

Naturally this takes cares of most C flaws, minus use-after-free, however due to their type systems, one tends to use heap allocations less than in C, although it remains an issue.

Oooof in light of Aaron Swartz. He plugged directly into a network switch that was in an unlocked and unlabelled room at MIT so he could download faster and faced "charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny, and unauthorized access to a computer network".

MIT really didn't lift a finger for this either.

>Swartz's attorneys requested that all pretrial discovery documents be made public, a move which MIT opposed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

- a github repo containing "the original, de-compiled source code for the Morris Worm" - see https://github.com/agiacalone/morris-worm-malware

- a high level report about the worm - see https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/internet-worm.html

I'm not dunking on Paul Graham here. If you know anything about me, if anything, this is a point in his favor. :)

https://seclists.org/bugtraq/1995/Feb/109

> we've installed the NCSA HTTPD 1.3 on our WWW server (HP9000/720, HP-UX 9.01) and I've found, that it can be tricked into executing shell commands. Actually, this bug is similar to the bug in fingerd exploited by the internet worm. The HTTPD reads a maximum of 8192 characters when accepting a request from port 80.

Put everything in MicroSoft Active Directory. Wait until it gets hacked. You will lose DNS, DHCP, Email, file servers, web servers, endpoints, etc. Obviously, running a mono-culture is a dumb thing to do if you want to keep your business running.

Maybe instead, run BIND on Linux servers, Apache on OpenBSD servers, have some Chromebooks, some Macs, etc. so everything doesn't go down together.

Really, it's not overblown... it's just common sense to diversify. Like we do with our diet/nutrition, with our financial investments, etc.

https://snl.no/Pål_Spilling#:~:text=Da%20Spilling%20kuttet%2...

It's very hard to extract Robert Tappan Morris from the context of his father being an extremely powerful man when trying to figure out how he managed to get away with what he did.

Thanks for the answer, I'll check out the book.

Not sure if that was supposed to be sarcasm[1] or was intended seriously, but for what it's worth Hafner & Markoff have frequently received a lot of criticism for playing fast and loose with the truth in that book. Now most of that is specifically in regards to their treatment of Mitnick, and I'm not making any particular accusation here. Just sharing a thought that "it's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book" might not be terribly strong evidence of $WHATEVER.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.

As someone who is old enough to have been a teenage hacker back in this timeframe and who spent his time on old Diversi Dial dialup systems which lead to early internet systems via gnu/fsf's open access policy, which lead to bitnet relay, and who was around during the initial development of irc right around this very year (1988) I can say that it was absolutely considered a bad act to do this sort of thing back then even as just a prank or demonstration (which made it kind of cool to back-then me, as a teenager, but which made it certainly unethical in a professional sense even for the time).

... however when you oopsied and the shit hit the fan, you could get away with it if your dad worked for the NSA.

The vast majority of people who weren't RTM would have had a far more severely negative outcome in his situation.

Mitnick didn't write any of this tooling --- presumably someone in jsz's circle did --- but it also wasn't super easy to use; spoofing tools of that vintage were kind of a nightmare to set up.

So by running BIND on Linux and Apache on OpenBSD and trying to tie it all into MSAD, what you're really doing is just expanding your attack surface, and once any of those are broken, attackers won't have to care about the state of the art in vulnerabilities to extend access from there.

The "monoculture" stuff is a product of a time when security pundits worried Microsoft was running the table on corporate IT. We're (generally) SAAS startup people here and very few of us run any Microsoft stuff. Almost all of us are better off extensively hardening a single Linux server environment than we are in deliberately trying to sprinkle NetBSD and Microsoft servers. That's doesn't improve security; it just turns your network into a CTF challenge.

But looking into the specifics again after all these years [1], I read:

"The N.S.A. wanted to clamp a lid on as much of the affair as it could. Within days, the agency’s National Computer Security Center, where the elder Morris worked, asked Purdue University to remove from its computers information about the internal workings of the virus."

and that CERT at CMU was one response to the incident [2].

So there is a whiff of the incident being steered away from public prosecution and towards setting up security institutions.

Robert Morris did get a felony conviction, three years probation, and a $10K fine. As for hn users, aside from pg, Cliff Stoll has a minor role in the story.

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/20...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm#Effects

”Computer crime” definitely was though.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but it seems like nothing was such a big deal at the time.

Everything seems to have gotten more uptight in the last few decades. I used to have a metal cutlery set that an international airline gave to every passenger on the plane.

It's a great read, but to echo what I said above: there have been a lot of questions over the years about the veracity of some of the details of their book. Take that for what it's worth. I enjoyed it enough that I've read it 3 or 4 times, but I do also suggest consulting other books on the same stories - particularly the stuff around K. Mitnick.

However the article has been updated so only the HN title has this flaw.

What you didn't have back then was financial fraud on the scale that happens today, where even nominal damages run into 8-9 figures.

And by the mid to late 90's (I'd say about 1997) it was finally becoming "received wisdom" to most hacker that "this is real now: getting caught doing this stuff could mean actual jail time, fines, not getting into college, losing jobs, etc." Now I grew up in a rural part of NC and so we probably lagged other parts of the country in terms of information dispersal, so I expect other people view the timeline differently, so YMMV.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil

I also used uucp for a few years though it soon got replaced with full internet. We were bit behind in Europe and we caught up fast. In the beginning I also had to use bang paths to avoid some misconfiguration upstream. Fido was actually better at this and the tool chain much more user-friendly. Though you still needed multiple. There was one to do the dial up and one to sort the retrieved mail, a "tosser" :)

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

If that’s too much, think of the internet as a series of tubes, and email as a digital boomerang that returns with an out-of-office reply attached.