Computer Viruses

A bit of history

2 November 1988 Robert Morris younger (Robert Morris), graduate student of informatics faculty of Cornwall University (USA) infected a great amount of computers, connected to Internet network. This network unites machines of university centres, private companies and governmental agents, including National Aeronautics Space Administration, as well as some military scientific centres and labs.

Network worm has struck 6200 machines that formed 7,3% computers to network, and has shown, that UNIX not okay too. Amongst damaged were NASA, LosAlamos National Lab, exploratory center VMS USA, California Technology Institute, and Wisconsin University (200 from 300 systems). Spread on networks ApraNet, MilNet, Science Internet, NSF Net it practically has removed these network from building. According to "Wall Street Journal", virus has infiltrated networks in Europe and Australia, where there were also registered events of blocking the computers.

Here are some recalls of the event participants:

Symptom: hundreds or thousands of jobs start running on a Unix system bringing response to zero.

Systems attacked: Unix systems, 4.3BSD Unix & variants (e.g.: SUNs) any sendmail compiled with debug has this problem. This virus is spreading very quickly over the Milnet. Within the past 4 hours, it has hit >10 sites across the country, both Arpanet and Milnet sites. Well over 50 sites have been hit. Most of these are "major" sites and gateways.

Method: Someone has written a program that uses a hole in SMTP Sendmail utility. This utility can send a message into another program.

Apparently what the attacker did was this: he or she connected to sendmail (i.e., telnet victim.machine 25), issued the appropriate debug command, and had a small C program compiled. (We have it. Big deal.) This program took as an argument a host number, and copied two programs - one ending in VAX.OS and the other ending in SunOS - and tried to load and execute them. In those cases where the load and execution succeeded, the worm did two things (at least): spawn a lot of shells that did nothing but clog the process table and burn CPU cycles; look in two places - the password file and the internet services file - for other sites it could connect to (this is hearsay, but I don't doubt it for a minute). It used both individual .host files (which it found using the password file), and any other remote hosts it could locate which it had a chance of connecting to. It may have done more; one of our machines had a changed superuser password, but because of other factors we're not sure this worm did it.

All of Vaxen and some of Suns here were infected with the virus. The virus forks repeated copies of itself as it tries to spread itself, and the load averages on the infected machines skyrocketed. In fact, it got to the point that some of the machines ran out of swap space and kernel table entries, preventing login to even see what was going on!

The virus also "cleans" up after itself. If you reboot an infected machine (or it crashes), the /tmp directory is normally cleaned up on reboot. The other incriminating files were already deleted by the virus itself.

4 November the author of the virus - Morris - come to FBI headquarters in Washington on his own. FBI has imposed a prohibition on all material relating to the Morris virus.

22 January 1989 a court of jurors has acknowledged Morris guilty. If denunciatory verdict had been approved without modification, Morris would have been sentenced to 5 years of prison and 250 000 dollars of fine. However Morris' attorney Thomas Guidoboni immediately has lodged a protest and has directed all papers to the Circuit Court with the petition to decline the decision of court... Finally Morris was sentenced to 3 months of prisons and fine of 270 thousand dollars, but in addition Cornwall University carried a heavy loss, having excluded Morris from its members. Author then had to take part in liquidation of its own creation.

What is a computer virus?

It is an executable code able to reproduce itself. Viruses are an area of pure programming, and, unlike other computer programs, carry intellectual functions on protection from being found and destroyed. They have to fight for survival in complex conditions of conflicting computer systems. That's why they evolve as if they were alive.

Yes, viruses seem to be the only alive organisms in the computer environment, and yet another their main goal is survival. That is why they may have complex crypting/decrypting engines, which is indeed a sort of a standard for computer viruses nowadays, in order to carry out processes of duplicating, adaptation and disguise

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