Re: The Coming Police State

["Mark W. Eichin" <eichin@paycheck.cygnus.com>]

<tcmay> writes:
>> prepared me for my later role as a hunted CyberFelon. ("Shockwave" is
>> also credited by many to be one of the first mentions of "worms" in
>> computers....though Brunner may've been talking to folks at Xerox
>> PARC...wormly cross-fertilization.)

and I digress wildly:

Mid-November, 1988, after the great Morris Worm Stomp[1], a bunch of
people who'd helped hunt the Worm were invited to the NCSC[2] to give
talks at a "Post-Mortem", as it were. The MIT and Berkeley crowds had
the most real technical data on it[3], though at least one of the
government labs had done a fair job at decompiling it.

The relevant part was that while the NCSC didn't have much useful info
on the Worm itself[4] they had *categorized* it, and among their
spiffy color slides, they had a "taxonomy" slide which surprised me by
including Brunner's worm. The NCSC seems to officially credit Brunner
as the first literature reference to the idea...
						_Mark_

[1] See <a href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu:21/pub/virus/mit.PS>"With
Microscope and Tweezers"</a>, by Mark Eichin and Jon Rochlis.

[2] National Computer Security Center (*.ncsc.mil) 

[3] if I may say so myself :-) MIT was represented by Jon Rochlis and
myself; we presented a draft of [1]. Berkeley was well represented as
well. 

[4] It turned out that the group that handled it was mostly PC
oriented, and didn't have a vax or 68k debugger on hand.