This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of the Internet Worm, the first major worm that propagated on the Internet. Even though many years have passed and underlying media has changed, worms are still able to wreak havoc and keep system administrators up at night. Today the damage done by worms is far less visible and far less newsworthy but far more difficult to repair than in the past.

On November 2nd, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris launched an application ostensibly designed to count the number of systems on the Internet. It was designed to propagate across Unix systems by exploiting several vulnerabilities, including a conceptual flaw in how r-services (rlogin, rsh, and rexec) authenticate connections, the archaic remote debug feature in Sendmail, and a buffer overflow in the finger daemon. Due to a flaw in it’s design, the Worm attempted far more propagation attempts than were necessary, causing targeted machines to slow dramatically from resource starvation. Long story short, the then Mr. Morris was caught, found guilty, and sentenced to probation and community service.

One last topic I want to mention. The criminal justice system could have thrown the book at Robert Tappan Morris 20 years ago, and it chose not to. Mr. Morris went on to become Dr. Morris, Professor at MIT and co-founder of Y-Combinator, a venture incubator that helps ignite promising startups. While not all individuals who come before the courts have the capacity to achieve that level of success, it would be wrong to think that every teenager and college student who ends up in Mr. Morris’s situation is irredeemable and should not be allowed to contribute to society. Who knows what the future may hold for both the individual and technology at large once these kids are directed a better path.