Worm up

It has been a week now since the WannaCry epidemic broke out. Britain’s NHS, hospitals in Canada and even the 40,000 affected computers here in India sounded distant. But then came the unkindest cut of all — a near lockdown on ATMs. Now we really wanna cry. The concept of the cyber worm first appeared in a 1975 sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider. Author John Brunner used the term to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network. Just like the tapeworm with its many segments, each of which can produce more worms when detached. Hence worm.

Rude Shoch

In 1978, American computer scientist John Shoch was working at Xerox PARC, a research and development company. He was analysing network traffic patterns, and wanted to install a program on all 200 Altos — personal computers — in the network. He wrote a self-loading program so he wouldn’t have to instal it manually. One night, Shoch left the program running. Next day it was discovered that the program had got corrupted crashing the host computer and every other PC connected to it. The good worm had gone rogue.

Morris’ major

Ten years later, a Cornell University student, Robert Morris, released an experimental self-replicating program onto the Internet. Purpose: gauge the size of the Internet. But an error turned it into this deadly thing. The attack disrupted Internet connectivity. This was the first big worm attack and exposed vulnerabilities in the system.
Morris was tried and convicted of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Morris worm is referred to as the “Great Worm”.

Long lust love

Fast forward 10 more years. In 1999, David L. Smith, a software programmer, released Melissa — the first successful mass-mailing worm. He posted on a newsgroup a Word document containing usernames and passwords for porn sites. If you clicked on it, the worm grabbed the first 50 Outlook contacts and infected them. Its author was eventually arrested. He had named his creation after a lap dancer. A year later, another mail worm exploiting another human frailty debuted. The Lovebug worm appeared in an email with “I love you” in the subject line. Many large companies and institutions were forced to take their mail servers offline. Really vulnerable!

Upala Sen