The Internet Worm Program An Analysis

Short Description
worm program. That program exploited flaws in utility programs in systems … This report gives a detailed description of the components of the worm …

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Content
The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis
Purdue Technical Report CSD-TR-823
Eugene H. Spafford
Department of Computer Sciences
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2004
spaf@cs.purdue.edu
ABSTRACT
On the evening of 2 November 1988, someone infected the Internet with a
worm program. That program exploited flaws in utility programs in systems
based on BSD-derived versions of UNIX. The flaws allowed the program to
break into those machines and copy itself, thus infecting those systems. This
program eventually spread to thousands of machines, and disrupted normal
activities and Internet connectivity for many days.
This report gives a detailed description of the components of the worm
program-data and functions. It is based on study of two completely independent
reverse-compilations of the worm and a version disassembled to VAX
assembly language. Almost no source code is given in the paper because of
current concerns about the state of the ”immune system” of Internet hosts, but
the description should be detailed enough to allow the reader to understand the
behavior of the program.
The paper contains a review of the security flaws exploited by the worm
program, and gives some recommendations on how to eliminate or…