This Day in 1988, the Morris worm infected 10% of the Internet within 24 hours
40 comments
·November 4, 2025NewsaHackO
I find it funny that:
1) He released it from MIT to avoid suspicion.
2) After he was convicted, he went from Cornell to Harvard to complete his Ph.D.
3) He became an assistant professor at MIT after that.
He had to be really spectacular/have crazy connections to still be able to finish his training at a top program and get a job at the institution he tried to frame.
tptacek
Have you read any of his papers? Morris was not fucking around.
dcminter
One of my favourite quiet jokes is the "Editorial Board" list for The Annals of Improbable Research¹ where RTM is listed under Computer Science. Asterisks after each name denote qualifications, RTM's being "Convicted Felon"
---
¹Awarders of the Ig Nobel prize
px43
You know his dad ran research at the NSA right?
His dad's also a badass and super fun to talk to. Never talked to the son though, but I'd love to some day.
NewsaHackO
I did not. That actually makes everything make much more sense. I was even wordering how he got out of jail time for something like this and just thought he had amazing lawyers.
tptacek
I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. I got serious access in '93, and into '94-95 there were still netsplits on it (UUNet/NSFNet is the one I remember most). It was a non-remunerative offense, with really unclear intent, that took out a research network. He had good counsel, as you can tell from the reporting about the trial, but the outcome made sense. I doubt his dad had much to do with it.
chihuahua
RTM Jr is a very nice person, obviously very smart, but also has a good sense of humor and is friendly and approachable. We overlapped as C.S. grad students at Harvard for several years.
xhkkffbf
> tried to frame.
MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. It was probably more effective than sending in some PDF of a paper.
AnotherGoodName
>MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers.
Oooof in light of Aaron Swartz. He plugged directly into a network switch that was in an unlocked and unlabelled room at MIT so he could download faster and faced "charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny, and unauthorized access to a computer network".
MIT really didn't lift a finger for this either.
>Swartz's attorneys requested that all pretrial discovery documents be made public, a move which MIT opposed
jszymborski
Agreed, it's hard to see this as some sort of "hacker respect hacker" in light of MIT's other actions.
It's very hard to extract Robert Tappan Morris from the context of his father being an extremely powerful man when trying to figure out how he managed to get away with what he did.
rs186
I followed his course 6.5840 on distributed systems (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/, YouTube videos at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs...) and completed the labs. One day, out of curiosity, I looked up his name. Then I realized what a legend he is.
Great course by the way.
xandrius
I expected some info on its functioning. The goal was to gauge the size of the Internet, how? Why did it fail? I guess Wikipedia for the rescue.
axpy906
> the internet in 1988
60k computers ( mostly at institutions ) in 20 countries
yodon
That was one scary exciting day (source: was running machines at MIT at the time)
canucker2016
I remember that day was sooooooooooo quiet on Usenet.
Not much was happening in the Eng and CS buildings on campus (except for those that had to deal with the worm).
wslh
I assume you all know that Robert Morris is one of the YC (and Viaweb) cofounders? [1] Together with Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell.
convolvatron
I used to keep a vt100 at the head of my bed, roll over and check on things a few times at night. 3am and everything is screwed. can't really log in anyplace, or start any jobs. The bus doesn't run until 5:30, so I just get dressed and walk across the bridge the to lab. Visitors center isn't open, so I just sneak through the exit by the guardhouse. They're civilian contractors, they either don't see me, or recognize me and don't care.
Since it's all locked up, I just reboot the big vax single user - that takes about 10 minutes so I also start on a couple of the suns. You have to realize that everything including desktops runs sendmail in this era, and when some of these machines come up they are ok for a sec and then sendmail starts really eating into the cpu.
I'm pretty bleary eyed but I walk around restarting everything single and taking sendmail out of the rcs. The TMC applications engineer comes in around 7 and gets me a cup of coffee. He manages to get someone to pick up in Cambridge and they tell him that's happening everywhere.
ChrisArchitect
This Week in 1988 rather.
teeray
I remember that the Boston Museum of Science used to have a floppy disk on display with the Morris worm on it.
canucker2016
Wikipedia says the Morris worm went out on 1998 Nov 2. No idea why they would publish the article on 2025 Nov 4 with that title.
krustyburger
canucker2016
A quick search shows:
- a github repo containing "the original, de-compiled source code for the Morris Worm" - see https://github.com/agiacalone/morris-worm-malware
- a high level report about the worm - see https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/internet-worm.html
nilamo
Both of those agree that is was '88...
mmooss
The article is from a somewhat reliable source; Wikipedia is not a reliable source (by Wikipedia's own rules). Maybe you should use the article to update Wikipedia?
ratelimitsteve
>However, the pioneering Morris worm malware wasn’t made with malice, says an FBI retrospective on the “programming error.” It was designed to gauge the size of the Internet, resulting in a classic case of unintended consequences.
had RTM actually RTM the world might be a bit different than it is today.
From the Wikipedia article:
Clifford Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg, wrote that "Rumors have it that [Morris] worked with a friend or two at Harvard's computing department (Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for 'Any news on the brilliant project')".
Has pg commented on this?