From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
Robert Tappan Morris |
Robert Morris |
| Born |
November 8, 1965 (1965-11-08)
(age 44) |
| Alias(es) |
rtm |
| Conviction(s) |
Intentional access of Federal
interest computers without authorization thereby preventing
authorized access and causing a loss in excess of $1,000.00
[1]
Jury returned a verdict of "guilty" on 22 Jan 1990, after 5½ hours
of deliberations[1] |
| Penalty |
Probation for a term of three years and
400 hours of community service in a manner determined by the
Probation Office and approved by the Court. Fines in the amount of
$50 (payable immediately); $10,000 (payable in the first year); and
$91/month for the three-year probation (payable monthly)[1] |
| Occupation |
associate professor at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology |
| Parents |
Robert Morris |
Robert Tappan Morris, (born November 8, 1965),
is an American
associate professor at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, in the Institute's department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.[2]
He is best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988, considered the first
computer worm on
the Internet.[3]
He is the son of Robert Morris, the former
chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a
division of the National Security Agency
(NSA).
The worm
Main article:
Morris wormMorris created the 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 programmed 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 directed
the worm to copy itself anyway, 14% of the time, no matter the
response to the infection-status interrogation. This level of
replication proved excessive and the worm spread rapidly, infecting
several thousand computers. It was estimated that the cost of
"potential loss in productivity" caused by the worm at each system
ranged from $20,000 to more than $530,000. The worm exploited
several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems,
including:
- a hole in the debug mode of the Unix sendmail program,
- a buffer
overrun hole in the fingerd network service,
- the transitive trust enabled by people setting up rexec/rsh network
logins without password requirements.
Robert Morris served no jail time, but was sentenced to
community service and probation, even though federal sentencing
guidelines in such cases called for much harsher consequences.
Biography
- 1983 - Graduated Valedictorian from Delbarton High School,
Morristown, NJ
- 1987 - Received his A.B. from Harvard. Came up with the
idea for the worm while working on arrays in his computer science
class
- 1988 - Released the Morris worm (when he was a graduate student
at Cornell)
- 1989 - Indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act of 1986 on July 26, 1989 - the first person to be indicted
under this Act
- 1990 - Convicted and sentenced to three years of probation, 400
hours of community service, a fine of $10,050 and the cost of his
supervision
- 1995 - Cofounded Viaweb, a
start-up company that made software for building online stores
(with Paul
Graham)
- 1998 - Viaweb sold for $48 million[4] to
Yahoo, who
renamed the software "Yahoo! Store"
- 1999 - Received Ph.D. in Applied Sciences from Harvard
- 1999 - Appointed as a professor at MIT
- 2005 - Co-founded Y Combinator, a seed-stage startup funding firm, that provides seed money,
advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year (with Paul Graham, Trevor
Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston)
- 2006 - Awarded tenure[5]
- 2006 - Technical advisor for Meraki Networks[6]
- 2008 - Released the Arc programming language, a
Lisp dialect (with Paul Graham).
His principal research interest is computer network
architectures which includes work on distributed hash tables such as
Chord and wireless mesh networks such as
Roofnet.
Morris is a longtime friend of Paul Graham. Graham dedicated his book
ANSI Common Lisp to him, and named the programming
language that generates the online stores' web pages RTML in his honor. Graham also lists
Morris as one of his personal heroes saying "he's never wrong."
See also
References
External
links
Bibliography
Hafner, Katie; Markoff, John (1991).
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier.
ISBN
0-671-68322-5.
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