Punishment

Taken from San Jose Mercury News, 5/25/89 (From the New York Times)

  Cornell University has suspended the graduate student identified by school
officials as the author of [the Internet worm].
  In a May 16 letter to Robert Tappan Moris, 23, the dean of the Cornell Uni-
versity Graduate School said a university panel had found him guilty of vio-
lating the school's Code of Academic Integrity.
  He will be suspended until the beginning of the fall semester of 1990, and then could reapply.
  No criminal charges have been filed against Morris.  A federal grand jury
this year forwarded its recommendations to the Justice Department, which has
not taken any action.



Where did this come from? Oh well, it's here now...

Student "worm" whiz is found guilty.  A U.S. court jury returned its verdict
about 9:30 pm after approximately six hours of deliberation.  Robert T. Morris
was found guilty of federal computer tampering charges for unleashing a rogue
program that crippled a nationwide computer network (Internet system).  A date
for sentencing has not yet been set.  Morris faces up to five years in prison
and a $250,000 fine.  He is the first person brought to trial under a 1986
federal computer fraud and abuse law that makes it a felony to break into a
federal computer network and prevent authorized use of the system.  Morris
testified that he had made a programming error that caused a computer "worm" to
go berserk and cripple the Internet system back on November 2, 1988.  The
"worm" he designed immobilized an estimated 6,000 computers linked to Internet,
including ones at the NASA, some military facilities and a few major
universities.  Morris's attorney Thomas Guidoboni argued that Morris never
intended to prevent authorized access.  However testimony showed Morris did
indeed deliberately steal computer passwords from hundreds of people so the
"worm" could break into as many computers as possible.  It was brought out in
the trial that he took deliberate and conscious steps to make the rogue program
difficult to detect and eliminate.  Morris camouflaged sending of the program
by unleashing it from the computer system at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge and made it look like it had been sent from the
University of California at Berkeley so authorship of the program could not be
traced to him at Cornell.  Other evidences showed Morris had at least six
earlier versions of the "worm", which had been found on his Cornell computer
accounts and that his own comments on the "worm" program used the words
"break-in" and "steal".






Robert T. Morris, the author of the Internet Worm program, was
convicted of a Federal felony in the case.  The law involved was 18 USC
1030 (A)(5)(a), the Computer Crime and Abuse Act of 1986.  He was found
guilty in February of 1990 in US District Court in Syracuse, NY.

In May of 1990, he was sentenced -- outside of Federal sentencing
guidelines -- to 3 years of probation, 400 hours of community service,
and $10,050 in fines plus probation costs.  His lawyers appealed the
conviction to the Circuit Court of Appeals, and the conviction was
upheld.  His lawyers then appealed to the Supreme Court, but the Court
declined to hear the case -- leaving the conviction intact.

For a while, Robert was (allegedly) working as a programmer
(non-security related) for CenterLine Software (makers of CodeCenter,
et. al.).  More recently, Robert has been working on his Ph.D. under
the direction of H.T. Kung at Harvard University.  He is also involved
with the ViaWeb company: .

To the best of my knowledge, he has not spoken publicly about the
incident, nor has he attempted to work in computer security.

--gene spafford
Feb 1996