Student Tells How ‘Worm’ Went Wild

The “worm” program that disabled thousands of computers nationwide was intended simply to enter computers, but an error caused it to go haywire, the graduate student who designed it testified Thursday.

“My purpose was to see if I could write a program that would spread as widely as possible,” Robert T. Morris told jurors in his federal computer tampering trial.

“The worm spread on the network far faster than I expected,” said Morris, 25, who spoke publicly for the first time about the November, 1988, attack that paralyzed an estimated 6,000 computers linked to the Internet network.

The suspended Cornell University student said he designed the software program to break into Internet. Morris said he gathered passwords from universities and without permission decoded them to ensure that the worm would spread widely. He also said he took steps to make the worm harmless and protect it from easy eradication.

“Once I released it I had essentially no contacts at all (with it). I couldn’t control it,” he said.

After releasing the worm from Cornell at about 8 p.m. on Nov. 2, 1988, Morris said he went out for dinner. When he returned about three hours later, he said he noticed Cornell’s own computer was slow to respond to commands.

Morris said he considered sending out a second worm program to track down and destroy the first one, but decided against that after seeing the unpredictable nature of the first worm.

If convicted, Morris, of Arnold, Md., faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.