ACM Home Page
Please provide us with feedback. Feedback
Crisis and aftermath
Full text PdfPdf (1.18 MB)
Source
Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 32 ,  Issue 6  (June 1989) table of contents
Pages: 678 - 687  
Year of Publication: 1989
ISSN:0001-0782
Author
E. H. Spafford  Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
Bibliometrics
Downloads (6 Weeks): 18,   Downloads (12 Months): 119,   Citation Count: 32
Additional Information:

abstract   references   cited by   index terms   review   collaborative colleagues  

Tools and Actions: Request Permissions Request Permissions    Review this Article  
DOI Bookmark: Use this link to bookmark this Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/63526.63527
What is a DOI?

ABSTRACT

Last November the Internet was infected with a worm program that eventually spread to thousands of machines, disrupting normal activities and Internet connectivity for many days. The following article examines just how this worm operated.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

 
1
Allman, E. Sendmait--An internetwork mail router. University of California, Berkeley, (issued with the BSD UNIX documentation), 1983.
 
2
Denning, P. The Internet worm. Amer. Sci. 77, 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1989}, 126-128.
 
3
Eichen, M.W., and Rochlis, J.A. With microscope and tweezers: An analysis of the Internet virus of November 1988. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy (May 1989}. IEEE-CS, Oakland, Calif.
 
4
Grampp, F.T., and Morris, R.M. UNIX operating system security. AT&T Bell Laboratories Tech. J. 63, 8, part 2 (Oct. 1984}, 1649-1672.
 
5
Harrenstien, K. Name/Finger. RFC 742, SRI Network Information Center, Dec. 1977.
 
6
King, K.M. Overreaction to external attacks on computer systems could be more harmful than the viruses themselves. Chronicle of Higher Education (Nov. 23, 1988), A36.
7
8
 
9
Postel, J.B. Simple mail transfer protocol. RFC 821, SRI Network Information Center, Aug. 1982.
 
10
Proceedings of the virus post-mortem meeting. National Computer Security Center, Ft. George Meade, MD, Nov. 8, 1988.
11
12
 
13
Ritchie, D.M. On the security of UNIX. In UNIX Supplementary Documents. AT&T, 1979.
 
14
Royko, M. Here's how to stop computer vandals. Chicago Tribune, (Nov. 6, 1988).
 
15
Seeley, D. A tour of the worm. In Proceedings of the 1989 Winter USENIX Conference. USENIX Association, San Diego, Calif., Feb. 1989.
16
 
17
Spafford, E.H. Some musings on ethics and computer breakins. In Proceedings of the Winter USENIX Conference. USENIX Association, San Diego, Calif., Feb. 1989.
 
18
Steiner, J., Neuman, C., and Schiller, J. Kerberos: An authentication service for open network systems. In Proceedings of the Winter USENIX Association Conference, Feb. 1988, pp. 191-202.
 
19
Uncle Sam's anti-virus corps. UNIX Today!. (Jan. 23, 1989), 1o.

CITED BY  32


REVIEW

"Thomas C. Richards : Reviewer"

This paper contains a detailed analysis of the Internet worm incident, which occurred in November 1988. During the evening of November 2 the worm spread quickly to Sun 3 systems and VAX computers running 4 BSD UNIX. As time went on these machine  more...