A while back a wrote a short article titled "the Conscious Internet" concerning the development of AI and computer technology in regards to the Internet. The article is written with a very philosophical approach to the subject, but handles real life facts. It has long been my intention to publish it here on the blog, but I just haven't gotten around to doing so. Until now ...
Here's part 4 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.
The second of November 1988 a young man named Robert T. Morris Jr. wanted to play a prank. He was a graduate student at Cornell University, and in the spirit of school competitiveness, he released a simple program on the Internet, a so called “worm”. The coding was modest; all the program did was to copy itself until the host computer ran out of memory and crashed. With the opus in hand, Morris hacked into rivalry school MIT’s computer network and unshackled his creation. Using a loophole in the operating system Unix´s network settings, Morris was able to bypass security measure and gain access to the core of the computer. Arriving at its destination the program began multiplying itself, blocking up memory, and thereby rendering the computer useless. When it was done with the first computer, Morris had told the worm to move on to the next neighboring computer, and repeat the process. What Morris had not taken into effect however was that in this case the neighboring computer was to be any computer hooked up to the Internet.
The process took less than a second to perform and within a few hours the chaos was evident. When Morris saw his creation escaping out of his control he immediately contacted a friend at Harvard to help him contain the issue. They quickly sent mail to major US servers, cautioning them of the worm and trying to convince them to shut down. But their warnings were already stacked up in the wake of the worm, and the plead was never even delivered. At that moment the worm had already destroyed more than two thousand servers, as well as over ten thousand computers, some of which belonged to NASA, the BRL, and MIT.
It took teams of programmers numerous weeks to sanitize all the affected computers, and the web was left inoperative for several days. What had started as a practical joke amongst two rivaling top universities, quickly escalated to the largest IT-devastation known to man. The total cost for the fabrications was estimated to be more than $53 000, and Morris himself was convicted to three years on probation, 400 hours of community service, and $10 050 in fines. Morris had negligently tripped over Pandora’s Box, and despite of all his programming skills and knowledge, he was unable to close it.
Suppose now that Morris´s worm was designed with another purpose. Instead of crippling the computers it came across, it would simply copy the contents of that computer and information back to a main hub. Morris would then have created a global network, where he personally controlled all the information that passed through it. A central computer system controlling most governing entities in the US; all-knowing and aware of any minute impact to the network – sound familiar? Today, such cataclysmic event may be regarded as far fetched. Improved anti-virus protections, higher encryptions, and better firewalls should prevent this type of disaster from ever occurring again. This is true to an extent; increased security measure has made it increasingly difficult to hack major system, however, at the same time, the algorithms used in viruses have also improved, placing this virtual arms race neck to neck.
... continues in Part V: Deciphering the Logic
That's fascinating since I didn't know the first "virus" started as a joke. How far it's come.
SvaraRadera