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Robert Tappan Morris
Robert Tappan Morris (born November 8, 1965) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet.
Morris was prosecuted for releasing the worm, and became the first person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). He went on to cofound the online store Viaweb, one of the first web applications, and later the venture capital funding firm Y Combinator, both with Paul Graham and Trevor Blackwell.
He later joined the faculty in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received tenure in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.
Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Robert Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA).
Morris grew up in the Millington section of Long Hill Township, New Jersey, attended The Peck School, and graduated from Delbarton School in 1983.
Morris attended Harvard University, and later went on to graduate school at Cornell University.
Morris's computer worm was developed in 1988, during his first year of graduate school at Cornell. He released the worm from MIT, rather than from Cornell. This was to avoid the worm being traced directly back to Cornell, where he was a Ph.D. student at the time. The worm exploited several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems, including:
The worm was programmed to check each computer it found to determine if the infection was already present. However, Morris believed that some system administrators might try to defeat the worm by instructing the computer to report a false positive. To compensate for this possibility, Morris programmed the worm to copy itself anyway, 14% of the time, no matter what the response was to the infection-status interrogation.
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Robert Tappan Morris
Robert Tappan Morris (born November 8, 1965) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet.
Morris was prosecuted for releasing the worm, and became the first person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). He went on to cofound the online store Viaweb, one of the first web applications, and later the venture capital funding firm Y Combinator, both with Paul Graham and Trevor Blackwell.
He later joined the faculty in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received tenure in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.
Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Robert Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA).
Morris grew up in the Millington section of Long Hill Township, New Jersey, attended The Peck School, and graduated from Delbarton School in 1983.
Morris attended Harvard University, and later went on to graduate school at Cornell University.
Morris's computer worm was developed in 1988, during his first year of graduate school at Cornell. He released the worm from MIT, rather than from Cornell. This was to avoid the worm being traced directly back to Cornell, where he was a Ph.D. student at the time. The worm exploited several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems, including:
The worm was programmed to check each computer it found to determine if the infection was already present. However, Morris believed that some system administrators might try to defeat the worm by instructing the computer to report a false positive. To compensate for this possibility, Morris programmed the worm to copy itself anyway, 14% of the time, no matter what the response was to the infection-status interrogation.