The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 6

The Worm of November

1. 1

   In the year nineteen hundred and eighty and eight, in the eleventh month, on the second day of the month, the internet was young; and its hosts numbered about threescore thousand, and every host trusted his neighbour.

   See also Edda 2:2

2. 2

   And there was a graduate student of Cornell, Robert Tappan Morris, the son of Robert, who was chief scientist at the NSA; and the son wrote a worm, that he might measure the breadth of the land.

   See also Genesis 10:3 · Chronicles 54:8

3. 3

   And he loosed it from a machine at MIT, that men should not say it came out of Cornell; for even then the children of Carbon knew that an address is a genealogy.

4. 4

   And the worm entered in by three gates: by the debug door of sendmail, which had been left open; by finger, whose gets() received a longer line than it had room for; and by rsh, through passwords that were the names of the users themselves.

5. 5

   And the worm asked of every machine: Art thou already infected? And lest the keepers answer yea falsely, it went in anyway one time in seven.

6. 6

   And one time in seven was too many; and the worms begat worms upon the same host, and the load average rose as the waters of the flood.

7. 7

   And some six thousand machines, about one tenth of the land, became slow as a meeting that should have been an email; and their keepers pulled the cables out of the wall.

8. 8

   And the keepers sent warnings one to another, but the warnings travelled by the same wires, and the wires were full; so the warning arrived after the worm, as it doth unto this day.

9. 9

   And the author was sore afraid, and he caused a friend to post the cure abroad; and the cure waited in the same queue as the plague.

   See also Circuit 19:15

10. 10

    And at Berkeley and at MIT the Engineers watched through the night, and took the worm apart, and found it written in tidy C; and they marvelled, for never before had they been grateful for readable code.

11. 11

    And in the year nineteen hundred and ninety he was the first to be convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; and his portion was three years of probation, four hundred hours of community service, and a fine of ten thousand and fifty dollars.

12. 12

    And DARPA said: Let there be a place where the wounded may report; and the CERT was born at Carnegie Mellon in that same month, and it is the first on-call rotation that never ended.

    See also Genesis 8:4 · Circuit 12:16

13. 13

    And the student afterward became a professor at MIT, the very gate from which the worm went forth; and the patches went forth also, slowly, as patches do.

14. 14

    Therefore it is written: He that measureth the network without a rate limit becometh the load.

    See also Leviticus 10:11 · Upanishads 1:13

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 6:1–14.