1980s news report on early internet virus | Hacker News Reader

1980s news report on early internet virus

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30 pointsRansomStark8 comments

For those not familiar with it, this is talking about the very first network malware, which spread across the entire internet and took down pretty much every connected server (that wasn't the intent, but a bug in the code caused it to attack machines far more aggressively than intended leading to overload of the infected machines).

Mark Eichin, who shows up in that interview, led the MIT effort to de-compile a snapshot of the payload in real time as it was spreading. Today that's a common thing, but it was seriously badass stuff when this thing hit back in the 80's (the first Internet "virus"/worm forced the community to figure out how to respond to such things in the moment as the net was under attack and machines were going down around you).

If you're interested in this kind of history, Cliff Stoll has some great notes on the experience written as it happened in The Cuckoo's Egg[0] (the worm hit as the book was in production, and Cliff was able to add an extra chapter at the end to cover the worm just as the book was going to press).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/CUCKOOS-EGG-Clifford-Stoll-ebook/dp/B...

Further background, the author of the worm was a cofounder of Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/

> which spread across the entire internet

It's hard to remember the personal impact of this even having lived through it. I think a lot of homes (esp. those with children and/or adult in teaching, design, or business) had computers, but even by late 1988, most probably did not connect to any network, and nearly all of those that did connect somewhere did only to various BBS and services like The Source, CompuServe and AOL. There were viruses transmitted by floppy for some time and it was a minor headache, but I do not recall if in 1988 The Source et al. had an Internet portal. I think the content of the publicly available 2400 baud Internet then (which for a private individual would be accessing newsgroups through a service on dialup) then was probably text, maybe a lot of slow steamy pictures, email, demos and pirated games. I suppose the DoD, NSF, and similar may have been heavily using the Internet then in interesting ways beyond email and ftp servers, but I can't think of what else in 1988 they might have been doing on the Internet (other than getting pwned, of course).

Web browsers hadn't been invented yet so the Internet in 1988 was mainly used at research universities and commercial labs. Definitely not a consumer product, but well on its way to being an important thing.

By 1988 you had interesting collaborations over the internet using Xwindows and CMU's various Andrew explorations. IIRC it was too slow to do remote computing but you could load binaries over AFS from, say, MIT's network to run on a system at CMU (and vice versa). Most consumer networking, if you could call it that, was over the proprietary Compuserve, AOL, services as well as over Fidonet, Usenet (using uucp for point-to-point and nntp for networked servers). Colleges and universities also had BITNET, utilizing IBM's RSCS over SNA (mostly text, mostly IBM mainframes but not exclusively, for point to point email or mailing lists).

I tried to find how Robert Morris was indicted, but the only source I could find on the whole internet appears to be https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/morris-worm-turns-25/3065/ pointing at his father (NSA cryptographer) convincing him to confess. Why did he tell his father in the first place? Cliff Stoll book suggests Robert Morris senior knew who was responsible in less than 12 hours after virus was released. Did his father (NSA) mediate between his son and NSA/FBI/Police?

The archive of Virus Bulletin is also a fantastic resource on cybersecurity prehistory. The first issue in july 1989 starts with this editorial https://www.virusbulletin.com/uploads/pdf/magazine/1989/1989... (warning: PDF)

“When the Brain computer virus appeared in 1986 it caused a media sensation but not an outrage. People were genuinely fascinated be the novel concept of a computer virus.”

Anything that forces Atari's E.T. (shown in clip) on you is a thing to be dreaded.

Why on earth was that clip included?

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