📸

4 Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Bonds

1 Ralph Roberts's book, Compute!'s Computer Viruses (1988), was the first attempt to put the virus problem into perspective.

2 UNIX was originally designed by AT&T and became popular at universities because it could be converted to run on a variety of different computers. There are hundreds of versions of UNIX. The rogue program attacked some versions of what is known as 4 BSD UNIX, a variant developed at Berkeley.

3 Computerspeak for more than one VAX computer.

4 Subsequent to the incident, one university tried the virus's list of passwords against passwords that were in use on its own systems and achieved a 14 per cent match.

5 To the layman and most of the press all malicious programs are viruses. To computer specialists, however, malicious programs have different properties and are divided into categories: viruses, worms, trojans and logic bombs. The ARPANET rogue program was actually a worm, though it often called a virus.

6 Despite initial comments on the 'high quality' of Morris's code, other experts have been less enthusiastic. Some have pointed to the supposed uneven quality of the program as evidence that part of it was borrowed from somewhere or someone else. The semi-official Cornell Report on the incident, presumably the final word, sniffed that the program could have been written by any reasonably competent computer science student.

7 'Wank' is English (as opposed to American) slang for masturbate. It has somehow crossed the Atlantic and is commonly used by US hackers.

8 Inevitably, computer bombs have been sub-classified as either 'time bombs', which explode on a given date, or 'logic bombs', which go off at a specific event.

5 The Bulgarian Threat

1 Tippett limited his projection to two years, from 1990 to 1992. Had he extended it to five years, it would have shown that all the world's computers would have become infected, suggesting that his mathematical model was somewhat flawed.

📸