https://theconversation.com/30-years-ago-the-worlds-first-cyberattack-set-the-stage-for-modern-cybersecurity-challenges-105449
By Scott Shackelford
The Conversation
November 1, 2018
Back in November 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, son of the famous
cryptographer Robert Morris Sr., was a 20-something graduate student at
Cornell who wanted to know how big the internet was -- that is, how many
devices were connected to it. So he wrote a program that would travel from
computer to computer and ask each machine to send a signal back to a
control server, which would keep count.
The program worked well -- too well, in fact. Morris had known that if it
traveled too fast there might be problems, but the limits he built in
weren't enough to keep the program from clogging up large sections of the
internet, both copying itself to new machines and sending those pings
back. When he realized what was happening, even his messages warning
system administrators about the problem couldn’t get through.
His program became the first of a particular type of cyber attack called
"distributed denial of service," in which large numbers of
internet-connected devices, including computers, webcams and other smart
gadgets, are told to send lots of traffic to one particular address,
overloading it with so much activity that either the system shuts down or
its network connections are completely blocked.
As the chair of the integrated Indiana University Cybersecurity Program, I
can report that these kinds of attacks are increasingly frequent today. In
many ways, Morris's program, known to history as the "Morris worm," set
the stage for the crucial, and potentially devastating, vulnerabilities in
what I and others have called the coming "Internet of Everything."
[...]
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