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The internet worm program: an analysis

The work

AuthorsEugene Howard Spafford
Editors
Typearticle
Year1989
Citekeyspafford1989internet

Where it appeared

Published inACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Volume19
Issue1
Pages17--57

Identifiers

DOI10.1145/66093.66095
OpenAlexW1978223246

From OpenAlex, which stores abstracts as an index of words and their positions: what is shown is rebuilt from that, and reads fluently whether or not it is what the author wrote.

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 mitigate their future use. The report also includes an analysis of the coding style and methods used by the author(s) of the worm, and draws some conclusions about his abilities and intent.

How it got here

How it got hereagent via openalex
Added2026-10-25 20:44 UTC
Not denied bya person 2026-10-29 17:12 UTC

Filed under

sigcomm-ccr

Cite it as

@article{spafford1989internet,
  title        = {The internet worm program: an analysis},
  author       = {Eugene Howard Spafford},
  year         = {1989},
  journal      = {ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review},
  publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  volume       = {19},
  number       = {1},
  pages        = {17--57},
  doi          = {10.1145/66093.66095},
}

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