Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

A Brief History of Worms

Worms are nasty, but they certainly aren't new. Major portions of the early Internet were disabled by the Morris Worm way back in November 1988 [2], but that wasn't even the first worm. In 1971, at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a researcher named Bob Thomas created a program that could move across a network of air traffic control systems, a startling target for such an early specimen. Thomas's so-called Creeper program moved from system to system, relocating its code between machines in an effort to help human air traffic controllers manage their work [3]. Unlike worms, though, Creeper didn't install multiple instances of itself on several targets; it just moseyed around a network, attempting to remove itself from previous ...