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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Another very good document (with some deeper technical detail) re: the Internet Worm is: http://www.mit.edu/people/eichin/virus/main.html

I doubt RTM ever wrote any commentary about the worm's creation but I think that would be really interesting to read. No doubt it's something he'd probably rather be forgotten, but it would be interesting to hear him talk about it.

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Mark Eichin and Jon Rochlis at MIT and Gene Spafford at Berkeley did some pretty amazing work, reverse engineering the attack payload on the fly in real-time to regenerate the source C code responsible for the attack while the attack was under way and at a time when no one was doing that sort of work yet.

My favorite part of those efforts was when Spafford posted a tongue in cheek bugfix patch to the attack code midway through the attack (at a time when the only people in the world with the source code were his team, Mark and Jon, and of course RTM since he wrote it). I couldn’t find the patch but it’s somewhere in the RISKS archives from that era.

Here's a link to Gene Spafford's writeup on the Internet Worm:

http://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/tech-reps/823.pdf

I believe the worm traveled with it's code, which it compiled since it attacked both Vax and Sun systems, so if you caught it in the act. You could grab a copy of the C code.

Some of the code, yes, but not all

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