Internet Worm

networking, security The November 1988 worm perpetrated by

Robert T. Morris. The worm was a program which took

advantage of bugs in the Sun Unix sendmail program,

Vax programs, and other security loopholes to distribute

itself to over 6000 computers on the Internet. The worm

itself had a bug which made it create many copies of itself on

machines it infected, which quickly used up all available

processor time on those systems.

Some call it "The Great Worm" in a play on Tolkien (compare

elvish, elder days). In the fantasy history of his Middle

Earth books, there were dragons powerful enough to lay waste

to entire regions; two of these (Scatha and Glaurung) were

known as "the Great Worms". This usage expresses the

connotation that the RTM hack was a sort of devastating

watershed event in hackish history; certainly it did more to

make non-hackers nervous about the Internet than anything

before or since.

(1995-01-12)