Hacker Robert Tappan Morris Story

Robert Tappan Morris

Hacker Robert Tappan Morris Story

Robert Tappan Morris picked up his knowledge of computers from his father Robert Morris, who was a computer scientist at Bell Labs and later the NSA. Morris is credited as the creator of the world’s first known computer worm.

Robert Tappan Morris, What did he do?

In 1988, he created the Morris Worm while he was a student at Cornell University. The program was intended to gauge the size of the internet, but it had a flaw: computers could be infected multiple times, and each infection would cause the computer to slow down even more. It rendered over 6,000 computers unusable.

Robert Tappan Morris Where is he now?

In 1989, Robert Tappan Morris was found to have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $10,050 fine. He eventually founded Y Combinator and is now a tenured professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Robert Tappan Morris Life And Bio

Life:-

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.

Robert Tappan Morris was prosecuted for releasing the worm and became the first person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He went on to co-found the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, and later the funding firm Y Combinator—both with Paul Graham.

Robert Tappan Morris later joined the faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received tenure in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

Biography:-
Born: November 8, 1965 (age 54)  the United States

Nationality American

Other names RTM

Occupation Entrepreneur, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, partner at Y Combinator

Known for Morris Worm, Viaweb, Y Combinator

Criminal status Fulfilled

Parent(s) Robert Morris, Anne Farlow Morris

Motive "To demonstrate the inadequacies of current security measures on computer networks by exploiting the security defects that Morris had discovered.

Conviction(s) United States Code: Title 18 (18 U.S.C. § 1030, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, March 7, 1991.

Criminal penalty 3 years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a fine of $10,050, and the costs of his supervision

Website: OPEN

Robert Tappan Morris

Robert Tappan Morris Early life

Robert Tappan Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior 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).

Robert Tappan Morris grew up in the Millington section of Long Hill Township, New Jersey and graduated from Delbarton School in 1983.

Robert Tappan Morris attended Harvard University, and later went on to graduate school at Cornell. During his first year there, he designed a computer worm that disrupted many computers on what was then fledgeling internet. This led to him being indicted a year later.

After serving his conviction term, he returned to Harvard to complete his PhD under the supervision of H.T. Kung and completed his PhD in 1999.

Robert Tappan Morris Later life and work


Robert Tappan Morris' principal research interest is computer network architectures which include work on distributed hash tables such as Chord and wireless mesh networks such as Roofnet.

He is a longtime friend and collaborator of Paul Graham. In addition to founding two companies together, Graham dedicated his book ANSI Common Lisp to Robert Tappan Morris and named the programming language that generates the online stores' web pages RTML ("Robert T. Morris Language") in his honour. Graham lists Robert Tappan Morris as one of his personal heroes, saying "he's never wrong.

Robert Tappan Morris Criminal prosecution

In 1989, Robert Tappan Morris was indicted for violating United States Code Title 18 (18 U.S.C. § 1030), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was the first person to be indicted under this act. In December 1990, Robert Tappan Morris was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050 plus the costs of his supervision. He appealed, but the motion was rejected the following March. Morris' stated motive during the trial was "to demonstrate the inadequacies of current security measures on computer networks by exploiting the security defects [Robert Tappan Morris] had discovered. He completed his sentence as of 1994.

Robert Tappan Morris Morris worm

Robert Tappan Morris worm was developed in 1988, while he was a graduate student at Cornell University. He released the worm from MIT, rather than from Cornell. The worms exploited several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems, including:

a hole in the debug mode of the Unix Sendmail program,
a buffer overrun hole in the fingers network service,
the transitive trust enabled by people setting up research network logins without password requirements.

The worm was programmed to check each computer it found to determine if the infection was already present. However, Robert Tappan Morris believed that some administrators might try to defeat his worm by instructing the computer to report a false positive. To compensate for this possibility, Robert Tappan Morris directed the worm to copy itself anyway, 14% of the time, no matter what the response to the infection-status interrogation.

This level of persistence was a design flaw: it created system loads that not only brought it to the attention of system administrators but also disrupted the target computers. During the ensuing trial, it was estimated that the cost in "potential loss in productivity" caused by the worm and efforts to remove it from different systems ranged from $200 to $53,000.

Robert Tappan Morris Timeline

1983 – Graduated from Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey
1987 – Received his BA from Harvard University.
1988 – Released the Morris worm (when he was a graduate student at Cornell University)
1989 – Indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 on July 26, 1989—the first person to be indicted under this Act
1990 – Convicted in United States v. Morris
1995 – Cofounded Viaweb, a start-up company that made software for building online stores (with Paul Graham)
1998 – Viaweb sold for $49 million to Yahoo, who renamed the software "Yahoo! Store"
1999 – Received PhD in Applied Sciences from Harvard for a thesis titled Scalable TCP Congestion Control
1999 – Appointed as an assistant professor at MIT
2005 – Co-founded Y Combinator, a seed-stage startup funding firm, that provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year 
            (with Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston)
2006 – Awarded tenure at MIT 
2006 – Technical advisor for Meraki Networks
2008 – Released the Arc programming language, a Lisp dialect (with Paul Graham).
2010 – Awarded the 2010 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.
2015 – Elected to Fellow of ACM (2014) for "contributions to computer networking, distributed systems, and operating systems."
2019 – Elected to National Academy of Engineering