Deadhouse Gates

The Internet will mark an infamous anniversary Sunday, when the Morris worm turns 20. Considered the first major attack on the Net, Morris served as a wake-up call about the risk of software bugs, and it set the stage for network security to become an important area of computer science. It was also the first time many non-techies heard of the ‘Net, as the mainstream media covered the story extensively.

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.