Advertisement

Hackers and Viruses : Computers Stumped by Ethics Code

Share
Times Staff Writer

Around the offices of Harvard University’s Aiken Computer Laboratory, a droll form of hero worship has begun to appear in the shape of small, hand-made posters depicting Robert Tappan Morris as the cerebral analog of a rock-star.

Under a spare, Thurberesque drawing of the 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student who is under federal investigation for launching the software virus that paralyzed computers from coast to coast--and alarmed a nation increasingly dependent on these mysterious machines--the poster reads: “RTM Lives: The Fall Tour.”

“He’s a hero among hackers,” says Steven Salzberg, a computer sciences student.

The competing view, which tends to be shared by older students of computer science and those who manage the multimillion-dollar systems now interconnected across the nation like neurons in the brain, is very different.

Advertisement

‘Stupid, Thoughtless’

“It was stupid and thoughtless,” says Dean B. Krafft, the director of computer sciences at Cornell, where Morris had spent only two months as a first-year graduate student before the night 10 days ago when computers from Cambridge to Berkeley began grinding to a halt.

Whatever was going on in Morris’ mind, he has at least succeeded in stimulating what many experts consider to be a long-overdue discussion of computer ethics. Is it wrong to penetrate someone else’s computer if you do no harm and seek no profit? Should computer data be copyrighted?

“The technology is moving so rapidly here that it’s somehow gotten ahead of the discussion and careful weighing of principles, as reflected in the slow evolution of the law in this area,” said John Shattuck, Harvard’s vice president for community affairs. “This case will certainly draw attention to the questions.”

Expanded Community

The American computer community long since has expanded beyond the world of dedicated amateurs turned pro, like Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who created the Apple computer in a California garage.

But the community retains a hard core of traditional hackers with their own concept of intellectual challenge and their own guiding ethos, one that seems to meld modern semiconductor technology with the frontier spirit of the Old West.

If the people who manage computer systems and own the software are the sodbusters who want to fence the land in, then hackers, in the minds of many of them, are the morally superior cowboys dedicated to the open range.

Advertisement

“They do not see software as property,” said Karen A. Forcht, an associate professor at Virginia’s James Madison University who lectures on computer security and is helping to draft a computer code of ethics. Only last week, a techno-prankster inserted obscene pictures into the university’s computer system that did no damage but took hours of downtime to purge.

“They would never think of breaking into a building and spray-painting their initials on a wall,” Forcht says. “But these same students think breaking into a computer is something else again, a seemingly harmless pursuit that offers the thrill of the chase, of beating the system.

“These people are as totally committed to what they do as Olympic athletes. But I really don’t think they understand the havoc they sometimes create . . . . They know nothing about the business side of a university, of the costs involved.”

The traditional hacker ethos holds that information should be free. Electronic breaking and entering into someone else’s computer is wrong only if it damages other people’s data, but not if it merely amuses, puzzles or annoys.

“Hacking rejects the standards the real world tries to impose,” noted Steven Levy, whose book, “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,” chronicles that free-wheeling American computer subculture.

‘Gets in the Way’

“This only gets in the way of what they’re trying to do,” Levy said. “Copyrights--deeds to digital territory--slow them down. Universally, hackers don’t like bureaucracy. It makes for inefficient systems and what they seek in systems is maximum efficiency.”

Advertisement

To hackers, said Levy, electronic breaking and entering is the rough equivalent of scaling the outside of New York’s World Trade Building or landing a small plane in Red Square. Risky, perhaps, but oh, so sweet.

The acceptability of breaking into someone else’s computer grew out of the shortage of truly powerful computers in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the days before time-sharing and the advent of the muscular microcomputers that line today’s store shelves. To write sophisticated software, talented young hackers became nocturnal creatures who stole electronically into university computers when everyone else was asleep, not just for pranks but to do serious work.

“Mainstream hacking is not so much involved in this kind of thing now,” Levy said. The new, more mature object of the game is to write elegant programs that “make computers do things beyond their seeming ability.”

The old hacking ethos lives on, however, in countless youthful minds as a rationale for games and pranks that may have less to do with advancing the art of software than with asserting control over one’s environment--if not the human one, then the electronic one--and assuaging emotional growing pains.

There is much truth in the stereotype of the computer hacker, said Jay BloomBecker of the National Center for Computer Crime Data in Los Angeles: young, white, male, cerebral and hungry for intellectual challenge.

Added James Madison University’s Forcht: “They are very bright, often very much loners, extremely introverted young men, not the ones you find drinking beer at fraternities.”

Advertisement

In this context, Levy said, Robert Morris’ apparent aim of cracking the Pentagon’s nationwide ARPANET system and inserting a small, unnoticed calling card--rather like scratching “Kilroy was here” on a chalkboard--seems to have been meant as a “classic control hack,” a deft, harmless, ego-expanding demonstration of his own post-adolescent prowess to manipulate vast systems from afar.

Morris, who has taken refuge at his parents’ home in rural Maryland and retained a lawyer, has not directly acknowledged responsibility for the single largest breach of computer security on record. But he has discussed it with friends in sufficient detail to leave no doubt that he--the son of a leading expert on computer security--wrote and spread the sophisticated “virus” program that ran amok and overwhelmed at least a thousand computers on the ARPANET system.

No evidence has emerged suggesting malicious intent on Morris’ part, and no data was destroyed. But, particularly in the computer world, time is money and time was lost. The total cost of the episode has yet to be tabulated, but some managers estimate that computer time lost in purging systems of the madly replicating virus over a two-day period reached millions of dollars.

Ivy League Hacker

In many ways, Robert Morris seems the archetypical hacker, but with an added sheen of Ivy League polish and broader interests than many of his colleagues.

“What can I tell you?” mused Dexter Kozen, his graduate adviser at Cornell. “I can tell you he’s very, very intelligent. He’s a darn good computer student . . . a good hacker.”

As depicted by friends at Harvard, where he was graduated last June, Morris is the middle of three children in a bookishly eccentric family that, for reasons no one seems to remember, are listed in the New York Social Register.

Advertisement

“They really knew how to live,” one of his closest friends at Harvard, Paul Graham, recalled. Not so much in elegance as in an atmosphere of finely tuned erudition that eschewed junk food, current pop music, television and lawn mowers.

While his father, Robert Morris Sr., worked at Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill and Whippany, N.J., for 26 years, establishing himself as a brilliant mathematician and computer programmer, the family resided on a modest Colonial estate near Morristown where the lawn was trimmed by a flock of sheep.

A graduate of exclusive Peck School in Morristown, Morris moved on to the equally selective Delbarton school, a Benedictine Order institution for boys, whose headmaster, Father Bruno Ugliano, noted that “we don’t just take anyone in off the street.

“He was bright, gifted, talented, but other than that, pretty ordinary,” Ugliano said. Morris is remembered, however, for arriving in the ninth grade already steeped in computer science. He had absorbed it from his father, with whom he maintained a close relationship--usually through computer mail--all through his Harvard years.

Delbarton offered its boys three courses in computer science, but Morris took none of them. “He’d had all that and the requirements were waived,” Ugliano said. The school, he noted, places special emphasis on inculcating a “sense of values, an orientation to the outside world.”

Ugliano does not believe the school may have fallen short in this instance. “This doesn’t surprise us,” he said, “because he was just the sort of person who could find a flaw in a computer system. But I don’t think this was anything malicious.”

Advertisement

At Harvard, where his father was graduated in 1954, the younger Morris quickly established himself as a virtuoso at the computer keyboard, devising intricate programs that generated crossword puzzles and delicately shaded architectural renderings. Though the quintessential hacker, he was not--his friends insist--one of the narrowly obsessive subspecies even hackers call “computer nerds.”

A former roommate at Harvard’s Dunster House recalls that Morris’ impressive collection of compact discs ranged from classic 1960s rock to opera--his favorite is Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”--to the mathematically symmetrical compositions of Bach. While others of his age might decorate their walls from the pages of Penthouse, Robert Morris chose a handsome collection of Italian prints.

Athletic Pursuits

Outside the computer laboratory, there was rock climbing, skiing and hockey. If Cornell University takes disciplinary action, one graduate student at Ithaca observed, the computer science team will lose its star skater.

While fellow hackers tend to gorge themselves on junk food, Morris’ preferences run to baking peanut butter cookies and preparing Indian food. He is said to like ginger ice cream. Not only did it seem that he had steeped himself in Greek and read Chaucer, one Harvard friend observed, he knew how to pronounce the names.

For all of this, his friends insist that Morris was modest and unpretentious. “I’d known him for two years when the subject of (his family’s membership on) the Social Register came up,” Paul Graham noted.

Yet an edge of youthful arrogance comes through the generally positive descriptions offered by his colleagues and instructors. He preferred to be addressed by faculty by the formal “Robert.” Admiring friends refer to Morris by his initials--also his computer sign-on--RTM.

Advertisement

Immature Impatience

More significantly, Morris displayed what seemed to some as immature impatience with subjects central to the curriculum but not to his own interests. In 1985, as his grades at Harvard sank, he took a year to work, and find himself, at a Dallas supercomputer manufacturer. Donna Burke, a spokesman for the Convex Computer Corp., said that Morris’ personnel records reflect that he was “reviewing his career goals.”

At Cornell, where Morris spent only two months as a beginning graduate student before the computer virus he apparently wrote exploded across the country, faculty and student colleagues seemed less in awe--a feeling that may not have escaped Morris himself in a new and more challenging academic environment populated by some of the best and the brightest of the nation’s computer graduates.

Dawson Dean III, a fellow student, said that he found Morris seemingly well-adjusted but “very private.” Prof. Robert Constable, who has had him over for tea, noted what he called a “strong independent streak” in Morris and an impatience with Constable’s course in computer theory.

Other Cornell faculty members suggested that his intelligence, while high, has been exaggerated in news accounts of his exploit.

“Clever but not brilliant,” was the judgment of Prof. Prakash Panangaden. “No exceptional attribute as a student that I could identify. He didn’t do anything that would cause us to sit up and take note.”

The nation did take note, however, late on the night of Wednesday, Nov. 2, when a mysterious computer virus began clogging up the memory of computers from Massachusetts to California and an embattled researcher in Berkeley sent out a desperate message that began: “We are currently under attack.”

Advertisement

Like his father, who is now chief scientist at the National Security Agency computer security research center, Robert Morris was drawn most strongly toward the arcane sub-specialty of protecting computers from unauthorized intrusion.

In that field, Cornell’s Robert Constable pointed out, “you’re constantly thinking of ways to penetrate the security of (computer) systems, to probe for weaknesses. And it becomes overwhelmingly tempting to try your ideas out.”

Paul Stodghill, a 21-year-old graduate student who shared an office with the younger Morris at Cornell, said that he is among those who give Morris the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he meant to carry out a harmless experiment that ran out of control.

But his office mate also believes that this episode should stir the computer community to reexamine the rules hackers live by.

“All of this is testimonial to the fact that computer science doesn’t have its act together on these issues,” Stodghill said. “We’ve been putting software together, but a lot of these things haven’t been sorted out yet.”

Contributing to this story were Melissa Healy in Cambridge, Mass., and Josh Getlin in Ithaca, N.Y.

Advertisement
Advertisement