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The seven young men sitting before some of Capitol Hill's most powerful lawmakers weren't graduate students or junior analysts from some think tank. No, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge and the others were hackers who had come from the mysterious environs of cyberspace to deliver a terrifying warning to the world.
Your computers, they told the panel of senators [YouTube] in May 1998, are not safe — not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that link them together. The companies that build these things don't care, the hackers continued, and they have no reason to care because failure costs them nothing. And the federal government has neither the skill nor the will to do anything about it.
"If you're looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be," said Mudge, then 27 and looking like a biblical prophet with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders. The Internet itself, he added, could be taken down "by any of the seven individuals seated before you" with 30 minutes of well-choreographed keystrokes.
The senators — a bipartisan group including John Glenn, Joseph I. Lieberman and Fred D. Thompson — nodded gravely, making clear that they understood the gravity of the situation. "We're going to have to do something about it," Thompson said.
What happened instead was a tragedy of missed opportunity, and 17 years later the world is still paying the price in rampant insecurity.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Thursday June 25 2015, @01:44AM
it was 10 years after the Great Worm. Remember that the MTM worm was so devestating because it used a few security holes in a large enough fraction of Unix machines that made up the majority of internet infrastructure.
10 years out from that, I could imagine that someone might have another list of security holes which could be used to make a similar worm that incapacitates most of the internet. I suspect that no one did this after MTM because a worm that achieves an infection rate that high and that wreaks that much havoc is much less useful than a lower profile botnet. The major worms after that have in a way been efforts at lower profile botnets that overshot their mark.
After MTM, anyone who wants to take down the internet is a teenager or a masochist. In MTM's day, no one really wanted to try. MTM just stumbled into being the first guy to show it was possible and who also showed just how hard the backlash would be.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Friday June 26 2015, @02:54PM
Are you referring to the Morris worm? My understanding is that even that worm wasn't intended to spread as rapidly as it did. There was a flaw an algorithm that led to it getting out of control. Each time it infected a new host it would check if the host was already infected. If so, terminate except in some small percentage it was allowed to duplicate. I think the percentage he chose was 10% but he later realized it should have been much lower.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Friday June 26 2015, @05:37PM
Yep I'm talking about the Morris worm. Even though it was unintentional he caused enough havoc to force many installations to disconnect from the Internet, and effectively partitioning the Internet into subnetworks.
So all at once he hoses the entire internet and leaves a trail back to himself. He may have only avoided a more serious punishment because of his father's connections.
He had no intention of doing what he did, but he effectively demonstrated that it was possible to automate attacks and shut down the Internet and he also effectively demonstrated that it's a dumb idea because you quickly attract the attention of people who can figure out how to find you.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Sunday June 28 2015, @07:43PM
I don't believe he took any real steps to protect himself or his identity. I think it was more of an ill-conceived juvenile prank than anything else. Simpler times, and all.