Re: Nematodes: The Making of 'Beneficial' Network Worms

[Dave Dittrich <dittrich () u washington edu>]

> This way of progating fixes may still prove useful in controlled
> environments. YMMV?

Some folks at Xerox PARC tried that in 1980, to disasterous results.
See:

        http://www.owled.com/essays/virus.html

...and:

        http://news.com.com/Year+of+the+Worm/2009-1001_3-254061.html

   Originally coined in a 1982 paper by researchers John Shoch and Jon
   Hupp of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the term "worm" is
   derived from "The Shockwave Rider," a 1972 science-fiction novel
   about the downfall of an Orwellian society caused, to some degree,
   by a "tapeworm" program that liberated data as it proliferated
   through networks.

   Shoch and Hupp had needed a way to automate the installation of
   Ethernet-performance measuring tools on more than 100 computers at
   Xerox PARC, so they turned to a class of programs that could send
   and install themselves across the network. The programs installed
   quickly, could be updated and ran automatically.

   "What we called the worm is a kind of distributed computation that
   is a really interesting and powerful thing," said Shoch, now a
   general partner at venture capital firm Alloy Ventures in Palo
   Alto, Calif.

   But to the pair's dismay, when their program developed a bug, the
   bad code automatically spread across the network as well.

   "The worm would quickly load its program into (the computer); the
   program would start to run and promptly crash, leaving the worm
   incomplete--and still hungrily looking for new (computers)," Shoch
   and Hupp wrote in a 1982 paper on the experiments with that and
   other self-spreading programs.

   "The embarrassing results were left for all to see: 100 dead
   machines scattered about the building."


--
Dave Dittrich                           Information Assurance Researcher,
dittrich () u washington edu               The iSchool
http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich    University of Washington

PGP key      http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/pgpkey.txt
Fingerprint  FE97 0C57 0843 F3EB 49A1  0CD0 8E0C D0BE C838 CCB5
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