a tour of the Internet worm of 11/2/88
Apr. 10th, 2006 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saint_monkeyI found this to be entertaining in a look-back-and laugh kind of way.
http://world.std.com/~franl/worm.html
In a strange way, my life in computers has been measured with virii and malware. 11/88 was my first month or so at an actual job in the military. I was at Falcon AFB in Colorado Springs. Specifically I worked in the Operational Software Maintenance Complex there, which was the only part of the base tied into the outside world, via a connection into Onizuka Air Base in Sunnyvale. Onizuka was connected to Berkeley, which got infected pretty early on.
From us, the worm got into MILNET. A big big deal. I can remember everyone suggesting ways to stop the worm from propigating, we didn't know what we were dealing with, and we thought that the packets would eventually stop coming, so we tried a reboot, but the processes just kept coming in, and we would become another slave terminal within a few minutes. I remember the head DBA asking why we couldn't just turn the modem off, and then everybody stopping still and then my supervisor, John Midkiff (he kind of reminded me of Ennis in Brokeback Mountain,) going, "yup, that would work."
The post-mortem from that took almost a year, and for the whole time, the modem stayed unplugged. The higher-ups were scared. They'd never even considered such a thing before, at the time, the internet was totally friendly, access to mainframes could be had just by asking, (if there wasn't an anonymous/guest login configured already,) so why would anyone attack it?
The generals never did turn the modem back on. Reading this now, knowing a little about network operations, I can see that this really was a very brilliant bit of hacking.
http://world.std.com/~franl/worm.html
In a strange way, my life in computers has been measured with virii and malware. 11/88 was my first month or so at an actual job in the military. I was at Falcon AFB in Colorado Springs. Specifically I worked in the Operational Software Maintenance Complex there, which was the only part of the base tied into the outside world, via a connection into Onizuka Air Base in Sunnyvale. Onizuka was connected to Berkeley, which got infected pretty early on.
From us, the worm got into MILNET. A big big deal. I can remember everyone suggesting ways to stop the worm from propigating, we didn't know what we were dealing with, and we thought that the packets would eventually stop coming, so we tried a reboot, but the processes just kept coming in, and we would become another slave terminal within a few minutes. I remember the head DBA asking why we couldn't just turn the modem off, and then everybody stopping still and then my supervisor, John Midkiff (he kind of reminded me of Ennis in Brokeback Mountain,) going, "yup, that would work."
The post-mortem from that took almost a year, and for the whole time, the modem stayed unplugged. The higher-ups were scared. They'd never even considered such a thing before, at the time, the internet was totally friendly, access to mainframes could be had just by asking, (if there wasn't an anonymous/guest login configured already,) so why would anyone attack it?
The generals never did turn the modem back on. Reading this now, knowing a little about network operations, I can see that this really was a very brilliant bit of hacking.
