07.05.11
Father of kid who wrote the Morris worm — first famous computer virus — passes
From the Philly News by way of the NY Times News Service:
Robert Morris, 78, a cryptographer who helped develop the Unix computer operating system, which controls an increasing number of the world’s computers, died Sunday in Lebanon, N.H.
The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Anne Farlow Morris, said.
Known as an original thinker in computer science, Mr. Morris also played an important clandestine role in planning what was probably the nation’s first cyberwar: the electronic attacks on Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government in the months leading up to the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
In 1986, Mr. Morris went to work for the National Security Agency in protecting government computers and in projects involving electronic surveillance and online warfare.
It’s worth adding that “probably the nation’s first cyberwar” went totally unnoticed. Minor embellishment to ancient history or not, cyberwars — if they actually occurred — never had any visible impact on Saddam Hussein.
There is, however, the hoax/April Fool’s joke that the Iraqi Gulf War printer virus story. (Alert readers may note that’s my by-line at the top of the pile.)
Two years after Robert Morris. joined the NSA, his son — Robert Tappan Morris, unleashed what became known as the Morris worm on the Internet. The younger Morris was a student at Cornell at the time.
The Morris worm incident spurred the creation of CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team, at Carnegie-Mellon.