Live Free, Die Hard and Watch Out For Viruses

I love Bruce Willis Movies. The Fifth Element, Sin City, 12 Monkeys are among my collection of DVD's that I watch over and over. If You think I'm weird for watching the same movies a lot you should check out my brother Bob. Bob must hold the record for watching The Fifth Element. He never misses it when it's on cable TV.

While watching Bruce's new movie I started thinking about computer worms and viruses. The movie is about Computer Terrorists and I'll leave it at that as this isn't a review of the movie, however I enjoyed it very much.

Last week a friend and I were talking about computer viruses and worms shutting down the Internet. I asked her if she ever heard of the Robert Morris Worm. She said she never heard of it and would like some more information.

The Robert Morris Worm From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Morris worm or Internet worm was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet; it is considered the first worm and was certainly the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It was written by a student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on November 2, 1988 from MIT. The worm was released from MIT to disguise the fact that the worm originally came from Cornell. (Incidentally, Robert Tappan Morris is now an associate professor at MIT.)

Back in 1988 I hacked accounts on Pitt.edu and CMU.edu computers using my trusty Commodore C64 just to chat in IRC on their VAX computers. (note for the SS, I gave up hacking long ago). I was in the hidden #hack channel on the old bitnet irc when the worm hit and got knocked off due to the DOS attack. Nothing was moving as it was explained later that the worm crawled around the net and filled up memory.

Morris claimed the worm was let lose by an accident.He was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a fine of $10,050. Many of my hacker friends and myself believe the worm was no accident.Morris's Dad was a major Unix programmer and the kid grew up with computers in his home which was very rare back then. To this day I believe that this was a planed attack to test the net to see if it could withstand attacks of this type.

As the movie plays out we see the terrorist hackers shutting down almost every network that is controlled by computers, Traffic lights, cell phones, Wall Street etc, all either shut down or controlled by the terrorists. Is this Movie a warning like the Morris worm was? Could this really happen? I say it can. I value the net because of the way it allows people to communicate and share information. There are people in high places that don't like blogs, that want to change free speech laws, that a worried about the way we share information. If the day ever comes when you turn on your computer and can't get on the net, don't say I didn't warn you.