21st

May.

Comments:

1337

Famous Hackers

Robert Tappan Morris

Robert Morris created one of the first worm files known as the Morris Worm while he was a graduate student at Cornell University. The original intent, according to him, was to gauge the size of the Internet. He released the worm from MIT to conceal the fact that it actually originated from Cornell.


The worm was designed to count how many machines were connected to the internet.


Unknown to Morris, the worm had a design flaw. The worm was coded to check each computer it found to determine if the infection was already present. However, Morris believed that some administrators might try to defeat his worm by instructing the computer to report a false positive. To compensate for this possibility, Morris coded the worm to copy itself fourteen percent of the time anyway, no matter the response to the infection-status query. This level of replication proved too much and the worm spread rapidly, infecting several thousand computers across the web.


It was estimated that the damage caused by the worm was valued between $200 to more than $53,000.


Because of Robert Tappan Morris' discovery of the flaw, some see him as one of the greatest hackers in history.

Back