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Robert Tappan Morris (born 1965) is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet. 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 Morris 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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to conceal the fact that it actually originated from Cornell. 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, fourteen percent 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 repair for the damage caused by the worm at each system ranged from $200 to more than $53,000. The worm exploited several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems, including: Biography Morris received his A.B. from Harvard in 1987. He received his M.S. in 1993 and Ph.D. in Applied Sciences in 1999 from Cornell and became a professor at MIT. 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. On July 26, 1989, Morris became the first person to be indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. He was convicted in 1990, sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a fine of $10,050 and the cost of his supervision. Morris is a longtime friend of Paul Graham (Graham dedicated his book ANSI Common Lisp to him) and in 1995 the two founded Viaweb, a start-up company that made software for building online stores. Yahoo! bought Viaweb in 1998 and renamed their software Yahoo! Store. Graham named the programming language that generates the online stores' web pages RTML in his honor. In 2005, Morris again joined Graham in founding Y Combinator, a venture capital firm. See also Hafner, Katie; John Markoff (1991). Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. ISBN 0-671-68322-5. Notes | ||||||||
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