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terrifying Golden Rules of Computer Security. “Rule One: Don’t Own A Computer.” The machine that Morris Jr. created was madeentirely of software. It took the form of a compact, simply designed computer program he’d written and designed to spread quickly and easily on the young systems of the Internet. It ran a mere 99 lines, took most computers nanoseconds to execute and it worked like this: The program – it later became known as a “worm” by the police who would come to find and arrest Morris Jr. – would find an open door on a network-connected computer. (In 1988, the pre-Warez Dude era, finding such doors was not difficult. Finding locked doors was probably harder.) Once Morris’ program had slithered inside and loaded itself onto the machine, like a dog slipping through an unattended puppy door, it would sniff around, rattle a few more doors to find any passwords that had been left unsecured. Then it would move on to the next machine. Knock, knock. Rattle, rattle. Next machine. Morris designed his code to simply repeat this process over and over. Filling, as a result, each machine’s memory with multiple, peformance-deadening copies of the same program. A house full of puppies, in a sense. After several hours of this flu-like spread, a wave of unplanned, unending computation began choking the net.

Morris later explained he’d only meant his program as a demonstration, as a test of sorts. He wanted to show how machines might be made more safe. But he seemed to grasp, almost immediately, that he’d made a mistake and that the worm was running away from him. He emailed a friend: How the hell to stop it? His friend had no idea either. They scrambled at least to warn system administrators about the dangerous code that would shortly devour their machines. “There may be a virus loose on the Internet,” they wrote. But that note, in a bit of bad luck, was quarantined inside a Harvard computer that had already been unplugged. So, a few hours after Morris released his code, unwarned and unprepared, the Internet froze. 212 On November 2nd and 3rd, 1988 machines around the world were shut off, cables were pulled out of walls, and systems were wiped and restarted in a race to stop the robot-like spread of the disease and then to finally kill it off. 213

The Morris Worm was, on those fall 1988 days, acting out a sober-minded insight of the famed biological historian Alfred Crosby: “The nineteenth century was followed by the twentieth century, which was followed by the…nineteenth century.” 214 Crosby meant that our age of topological connection meant we were back, again, in an age of infections. And this was true: Morris program was mapping out, like an epidemic, new routes in the age of high-speed digital contagion. But – and this is why we care about it here – by the time it reached “peak infection”, the worm was

212 So, a few hours: David Moore, Colleen Shannon, k claffy, “Code-Red: a case study of the spread of a worm on the Internet” IMW ’02 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment (2002), 273-284
213 Morris later explained: Ted Eisenberg, David Gries, Juris Hartmanis, Don Holcomb, and M. Stuart Lynn, Thomas Santoro, “The Cornell Commission: On Morris and the Worm”, Communications of the ACM (June 1989, 12: 9) 706
214 The Morris program: Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) xii

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