Student Guilty of ‘Worm’ Attack on Computer Net

A jury Monday night found a graduate student guilty of federal computer tampering charges for unleashing a rogue program that crippled a nationwide computer network.

Robert T. Morris, 24, faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He is the first person brought to trial under a 1986 federal computer fraud and abuse law that makes it a felony to break into a federal computer network and hamper authorized use of the system.

The jury returned its verdict at about 9:25 p.m. after nearly six hours of deliberations.

Morris, of Arnold, Md., testified during his trial that he had made a programming error that caused a computer “worm” to go berserk and cripple the Internet system on Nov. 2, 1988.

Morris would not comment on the verdict as he left the federal courthouse.

The worm he designed immobilized an estimated 6,000 computers linked to Internet, including ones at NASA, military facilities and major universities.

Morris may not have intended his “worm” program to paralyze the network, but it was no accident that the worm attacked the network, U.S. Justice Department trial lawyer Mark Rasch said in closing statements earlier in the day.

“The worm didn’t break in by accident or mistake. Robert Morris intended for the worm to break in,” he said.

Defense attorney Thomas Guidoboni reiterated his argument that the suspended Cornell University graduate student simply made a programming error.

“It’s not the side effects, it’s not the mistakes, but what he actually intended to do,” said Guidoboni. “He never intended to prevent authorized access.”

Prosecutor Ellen Meltzer reminded the jury in her summation that testimony showed Morris deliberately stole computer passwords from hundreds of people so the worm could break into as many computers as possible.

She added that Morris took deliberate and conscious steps to make the rogue program difficult to detect and eradicate. He unleashed the worm from the computer system at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and made it look like it was sent by the University of California at Berkeley so authorship of the program could not be traced to him at Cornell, she said.

She said at least six earlier versions of the worm were found on Morris’ Cornell computer accounts and that his own comments on the worm program used the words “break-in” and “steal.”

“These are not innocent words and Robert Tappan Morris did not use these words by mistake,” Meltzer said.

She also told the jury that Morris’ “worm was not a juvenile prank . . . In no way was it a legitimate Cornell research project gone awry.”

Guidoboni insisted that Morris didn’t intend to cause permanent damage to computer files. “There was no work lost, work was delayed. That’s the bottom line,” said Guidoboni.

Morris took steps to limit the worm’s growth, he said.

“If he intended to bring the systems down, he didn’t need to control the growth. He could have just let this thing go,” said Guidoboni.